I got the printer working (miracle, it's wireless, and will printers ever work first time?) and printed the line drawing I made in Procreate last week. Above is the first stage in pen on semi-opaque paper laid over the print, in my 'portable studio'. The photo looks fuzzy because of shadows cast by the ink drawing over the print. While I was drawing I scribbled a few notes - the foreground pot reminded me of the legs on Gormley's Angel of the North in Gateshead, and I also began to think of umbrellas and other pleated forms. Progress stages above show, top left, a digital version with blacked out background, closely following the original sketch. Top right shows starting to fill the drawing with shading; bottom left shows shading of the outline complete, and the right hand side is just where I wandered with it afterwards. I let it go, although it wasn't what I intended; I wanted to reproduce the original notebook sketch on a larger scale and I'm not sure about the added elements coming from the pots - I had intended focusing on the fluted forms. I'll keep going with this one, though, then perhaps begin again another drawing sticking to the plan.
I decided to begin new explorations into the finned and fluted by recreating the original tiny sketch in one of my 2014 notebooks. It only measures 9cm wide and I want to make it twice that size now, so I took a close-up photo with my phone and transported it into Procreate on my iPad (which, incidentally, is as old as this drawing) and made a basic outline tracing. I will print this digital tracing at the size I want to draw it, so I can retrace it in pen on semi-transparent tissue and make it into a new drawing. It won't be hard to get back into the way I was thinking at the time of doodling the first one, but decisions have to be made - which marks will best suit today's work, where flutes begin and end, what the forms are doing, etc. Giorgio Morandi has been a giant inspiration for me since I discovered his work while attending Edinburgh College of Art in the late 1970s. This is one of my favourites. It is held in the Estorick Collection (lots of info and some phenomenal Morandi works to view here). I love how bizarrely free and joyous the drawing is in spite of the taughtly etched mark-making. Interestingly, he made the etching some 10 years (maybe 12) after the original work - so I don't feel so weird about picking up on something again 10 years after the first version on a 10-year-old iPad. I'm in good company! - and oh boy, I would love to own one of these.
A second idea I had in mind for the earth section of this drawing was to fill the strata lines with energised red darts flowing upwards into the flower section. When I was a youngster (and sometimes still to this day) I used to fancy I could see red energy shooting through the trunks and branches of trees. I had temporarily removed the large petal to the right of the flower head, but liked the ghostly transparent shading which remained. It had occurred to me that plants are more than part earth, part flower - they are also of the air, especially when their seeds float off, dressed in fairy costumes. I liked the way the ghost petal puffs airily across the linear work so I included it. I also remembered a collage I made in January 2021 with a big trumpet shooting out of a flower, and had liked its ridiculous humour, so I added something similar to this version. When I had finished the bulb section beneath the flower head I didn't like the way it looked with the crossed over leaf stems, a hangover from the original Voynich manuscript which worked fine in the first version of the drawing (finished version below). The red darts made the cross section resembled laces on a dance shoe, or the waistcoat of a lady Highland dancer - not what I had in mind at all. An amended version of the drawing made the section into a more organic affair, with leaf shoots peeling out of the bulb itself instead of crossing over it. I recognise the fact that this isn't exactly dynamic blogging, the image hardly changing from post to post, but, hey - art is like that sometimes.
The new style 'lights', or star shapes, are looking good now. Here they are sitting in my Dad's yacht plan drawing as part of my Neruda's boats project; a little boat carrying lights. I'm taking some time here to admire some simple, elegant geometry: these two images are guides for pattern designs I made to produce nice, flowing ogees. Made without much in the way of tools, I have written a bit about the process over on my Binky blog.
Some roundel/wheel motifs I traced on my iPad during the week, based on a drawing from 2018 I posted here a few weeks ago. They remind me of stained glass windows, so I'm thinking they could represent lights for my Neruda's boats project. This drawing sticks closely to the colours in the original work, but because I have worked in layers in Procreate I can experiment with the saturation to brighter, more glassy colours. I rather liked the ones below on a dark ground. My iPad serves as a convenient sketch book, not dependent on light quality or space (just as well, because I still haven't put away the Christmas decorations which are boxed up in my work room ready to go into the loft!) Work made this way reproduces beautifully as prints, too. Here are a couple of experiments I already made, playing with colour and direction - and I also couldn't resist making them into a half-drop pattern, which I posted to my Binky blog.
Collecting images and putting them together in Procreate to see how they talk to each other, this lobster creature looks as though he is playing the harp with one of the Polynesian navigation chart drawings. I thought it looked like some fisherman's weird dream, perhaps rather a horrid one in which he turns into a sea monster! Fisherman's Blues came to mind as a title, named after one of my favourite albums of all times by The Waterboys. The ocean crests are borrowed directly from one of my Binky McKee book illustrations, the sort of fruitful melting-pot mix Procreate enables which I particularly enjoy. I have been working on making some of the recent images a little larger, which means scaling up and redrawing to keep crisp lines. Because most of them originated a few years ago with no other thought than to use them for Instagram posts at 1080px, they are very small; but I am thinking they might make nice prints, so I'm keeping my options open and increasing the size of canvas. The dimensions of this one would be 289 x 216mm at 300dpi, which is a nice size suitable for the subject matter. Otherwise, if I printed any of the recent compositions some of them would only measure 181mm on the largest dimension, which is a little bit too dinky. I have had this framed drawing lying around in my work room since my 2018 Brave Oleander exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh (eek, I had blonde hair back then, I'm back to my native reddish now!), but during the week I hung it on the bedroom wall. It is daily drawing no.98 from a series I worked in 2016, titled Really Good Coffee. It looks great in its new position. Its sharpness, clarity and brightness has an impact which belies its small scale of 189mm square, and it is great fun - so I am thinking now a revisit might be in order. Accordingly, it has been mentally added to my current Neruda's Boats project. This magpie stage of collecting and bringing together all sorts of aspects of my work is an exciting process.
I returned to work this week, but last week I reluctantly had to take time off work due to sickness. I had all the symptoms of Covid: a terrible productive cough, headache, lost senses of taste and smell, general fatigue, fever, aching bones, and felt like I had pneumonia again - but tested negative for Covid three times, so I guess it was just a lergy which has been sharing freely at work. I felt so dreadful I couldn't believe it wasn't Covid, but I suppose it just goes to show there are other nasty bugs. After a week in bed sleeping it off I began to feel better. Not well enough to have any brilliant new ideas, but well enough to be able to work on my iPad in my sick-bed; I got through a lot of Binky pattern-making, and played around with some of the motifs I had been tracing from my drawings, together with recent Polynesian navigation sticks drawings and boat shapes.
Some more work on the Neruda's Boats theme this week. Above are drawings made in Procreate (my digital sketchbook) from the waste material left from cutting out sewing templates. The drawings are overlaid with Polynesian stick charts lines drawings. The shape second from the bottom bears tiny notches, which on the sewing template are my alignment guides - that also fits with navigation, in this case manipulating and matching cloth cutouts to form a 3D shape. Below is an image of a boat (overlaid with my Dads' yacht draught plans) made from one of the cutouts, in full sails which are drawn from one of the navigation charts, interspersed with wind direction and extra navigation from the stars. A little asemic text, resembling a title, appears in the top right, which also resembles a boat - that's just a coincidence, it was originally created by exaggerating curves drawn around a printed word in a magazine, which was a real word but now I have forgotten what that was, so it has just become a form to me. I like that relationship to my drawing of a Polynesian stick navigation chart; I can't read that, either. Nor can I read my Dad's architectural drawing of a yacht overlaid on the boat's body here. But I do understand Neruda's poem If You Forget Me :
... as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me. Two years ago I discovered Polynesian navigation stick charts and became absolutely fascinated with them. I made a number of quick sketches of different charts at the time on my iPad and played around with them, sometimes combining charts, and placing them against various backgrounds. They weren't resolved in any way, full of digital wobble and not really that good (see February 2021 blog entry). My interest in the subject hasn't waned since, and this week I revisited the drawings in the light of my recent nautical themes. I redrew them (neatly this time!) using the same method as last week's tracing of my Dad's yacht plans; the image above shows four different combinations of chart drawings overlaid on each other. I have actually now answered my own question from two years ago - I decided against keeping the 'digiwobbles', as I called the digital shaky line. I either ignored or hadn't yet discovered the streamline adjustment on Procreate's tools, but kind of liked the wobble at the time. Now I'm going straight, so to speak. A much better result this time, in tune with my current aesthetic. As I drew each one I tried to imagine what the lines meant. I don't understand how to read the charts at all, I simply admire their elegance and arcane relationship with sea, canoe, waves and sky. Apparently only the maker of each chart knew how to interpret it. I understand from a little reading on the subject that the curved lines seem to represent swells in the sea, and the intersections mark the position of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Shells were often tied to the sticks to mark the positions of islands, and gauge the distance from a canoe; prevailing winds and currents of the seas are also somehow indicated. I don't think I want to know much more than that, it might spoil the poetry of the charts, and I'm not sure exactly how much information is available on the subject anyway given that only the maker of the chart could use it. I have a feeling the charts' meanings may have been closely guarded secrets.
The images here are experiments drawn on my iPad, feeling my way through the subject and exploring how I can express the charts' relationships with the wilderness of ocean through which they guided men in nothing but small canoes. I can't decide whether or not this was a spooky experience, tracing my Dad's handiwork from many years ago. I noticed lots of things I hadn't seen before, such as some of the lines are broken at regular intervals with a little dash. I don't know why this is, perhaps they indicate the grid on which the curves of the yacht keel are drawn. I traced his numbering system, and how the years rolled back to see his familiar handwriting, but weirdly drawn by me. I even made myself signature initials in the same style which look nicely unselfconscious and fit well with the plan drawing. I worked digitally in layers which provided the excitement of being able to see architectural drawing in relation to my other drawings - interesting to see the one above using Dad's architectural templates he used in his plans, together with an actual plan drawing.
Another advantage to working digitally in that I can still explore ideas and work in poor light. I should have organised all of this in the winter months, but it's still useful even now when the days are drawing out and lengthening with the promise of spring approaching; the evenings are still dark, and my work room is still very cold. These drawings were made in Procreate on iPad with the intention of producing physical drawings from them in ink on paper. However, when I began experimental drawings yesterday I found it didn't work for me at all. I'm not entirely sure why; something to do with the materials and the pens I was using just didn't gel and the drawings were clumsy in a bad way. I tried a variety of papers, even working over a mono-print texture, but it didn't solve the problem. The results of each experiment were only marginally different, lacked character, and yielded nothing satisfactory. It's possible the digital work doesn't translate well into drawing, or perhaps it doesn't suit my style, being too representational; but I had to face the fact that the digital versions were superior, and better left in that domain for now. The main problem lay in the quality of my mark-making. I used Procreate's 'ink bleed' brush on a minimal line size for the digital versions shown here. It has a slightly soft, broken line which provided a light intricacy. This was missing altogether in the physical drawings. It is possible that if I worked them on a larger scale the marks would be relatively smaller and more delicate. Around A2 size (594mm on the long dimension) would probably be better, giving them space to breathe, whereas I was trying them at approximately A5 (210mm on the long side) and the results were too crowded. Also, my current mapping pen is new, full of ink, and producing a dark line. I generally prefer the lighter, finer lines of part-used ones for intricate drawing. I was working with the Christmas exhibition 'On a Small Scale' at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh in mind, but I can see from my experiments that these won't do for that particular show - fortunately, however, I have plenty of other ideas on the go which I shall get on with, and perhaps return to these lovely moths and plants at a later date.
Progress of the Voynich inspired drawings. Initially I had no interest working on my iPad other than getting outlines and compositions just right, but developing my own mark-making and tones to suit produced surprisingly beautiful, delicate results. I didn't imagine I could produce anything so fine with a stylus. Gradually they became works in their own right; I suppose you could call it digital, but the process is exactly the same as when I draw with ink on paper. I have discovered a way to achieve the intricacy I aim for in my work on iPad. At first it occurred to me that this was a perfect method for producing prints on art papers which could perhaps be hand-coloured, harking back to my days working for the British Museum as a hand colourist. Later, I realised I was setting myself up for continuing my drawing practice during the poor light of the winter months, as no extra light is required; with the huge increase in energy prices I definitely will not be burning up money on lighting this year. Previously I have been forced to abandon physical drawing in the dark winters, but I now see a way to prepare for drawings when the brighter days of spring and summer arrive.
Yesterday I was working on colour separations of two bright compositions with a view to making a pattern (here on my Binky blog). The proportions and 'attitude' of the designs were just right, and I grew interested in working them as drawings, picking up on something I was thinking about in May (you can see the original page from the manuscript here).
I was turning over ideas as to how to take them into the delicate realm of drawing today when I received an invitation to submit work for Open Eye Gallery's Christmas exhibition. I thought the Voynich inspired works could be perfect for that, but didn't yet know which direction to take or whether I had anything at all there beyond an idea. I didn't want to lose their quirky nature, so before accepting the gallery's invitation, I took an unprecedented step to see if my ideas would work - I traced outlines of the previous colourful experiments on my iPad. This enabled me to put several compositions together quickly and experiment with different drawing techniques. Working in Procreate, layers' visibility can be toggled on and off. I was interested in the marks where outlines were removed; they look so airy. This is a good example of my illustration interests merging with my drawing interest. I took the crackled map-like photo from last month and collaged flowering vines and birds onto it.
It's more of a Binky McKee job and no doubt will appear somewhere in the Binky archives, but it perfectly demonstrates a collaboration - after all, I am the same person, and my life isn't all schizoid! The drawing above is a late night Procreate doodle inspired by a rootball which came out of a pot in the garden - I must have been watching too much news recently. I think it would make a wonderful etching.
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Welcome to my work journal - a weekly update on drawings, work in progress, doodles and day-dreaming.
I changed the website address a few months ago, so some older links on previous posts are broken. If you click one of those and it takes you to a strange page, simply replace the .co.uk after the heatherelizawalker. with weebly.com and it will work again. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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As well as the work you see here, I illustrate under the name of Binky McKee (my mother's maiden name was McKee, Binky was every single one of my great grandmother's many cats!)
If you would like to visit my Binky website, please click the picture above. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Dissolving PeopleA symbol on the footpath outside a local primary school gradually disappearing as the image breaks up and wears away until eventually it is obliterated by leaves and barely discernible. Photographed at intervals of several months between February 2021 and November 2022, oldest at the top.
(My shoes look so new in the first pic, and note the transition to new phone in the last photo). <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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April 2024
(Sorry the archives don't nest!)
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A 2013 work book, still very much in use Please note all images on this website are ©Heather Eliza Walker 2013 - 2020, and may not be used or reproduced without prior consent. |