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.
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.
Two creatures I drew this week, based on icy shapes which had formed overnight on a picnic table back in January. I thought they were interesting and looked like lobsters, so I took some photos in the early morning darkness with the idea of making drawings from them, similar to the organisms in Before There Were Saturdays. They do tie in loosely with my recent boat/sea/navigation themes inspired by Neruda's boats poem. I drew them in Procreate on my iPad using separate layers; above are the 'shading' marks in one layer which evoke a ghostly and delicate image, with the outlines on a different layer. I am still at the stage of collecting and gathering for new work, but I also see another potential drawing in the photo of a dinosaur being pursued by a long-nosed witchy fox spirit. Incidentally, the photo in its weird winter light reminds me of scanning electron microscope images.
Tracing some little motifs on my iPad, I inverted the image to see my lines better. The powdery deep blue background with chalky-looking lines reminded me of a chalkboard.
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. Inspiration during the week visited at work in the form of scraps left over after cutting around templates for chair lugs. To my mind they are boat shapes, which fits well with an idea for a project I have been playing around with in my mind for years to make work about a line from Pablo 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. My first idea, years ago, had been to make lots of small clay open canoe forms with inclusions fired into their cavities to represent the aromas, light and metals, and arrange them as if travelling in a river to flow around a space. Later, however, after my Dad passed I inherited his architectural plans. Amongst them are drawings for a large yacht which was built some time in the 80s, I think. These particular plans have been a source of inspiration for me ever since. The mathematical beauty of the drawing's abstract sweeps and curves expressed in simple bare lines negated my first idea of using rough clay for work based on Neruda's words: too clumsy, I thought. I had begun to feel paper might be a better choice; the fact Neruda uses the word 'little' to describe them indicates a vulnerability, delicacy, or fragility. Then, some time ago I unconsciously started 'doodling' paper shapes into tiny, long boats. I hadn't even noticed what I was doing at the time, but after one had hung around in my work room for a couple of years I realised I was still thinking about Neruda's boats. You can find Neruda's full poem after the Read More break.
I thought I would show this very early stage of work in progress before I start drawing into it. Back in the summer I set up a number of these frottage prints of plants found in the garden or while out walking. I arranged parts of them on a piece of cardboard, placed the paper for the drawing over them, and rubbed an inked roller over the paper. This one is a weed from the garden with long pods which had sprung open to disperse hundreds of fluffy seeds which floated off in the breeze. I could see them from the upstairs windows rising up into the sky with an airy sense of freedom - no wonder the weeds do so well, they must travel for miles like that.
I think I may do this one simply in black ink, picking up on a set of drawings I began in August 2021. NB my recent drawings can be seen in the Open Eye Gallery's On a Small Scale exhibition which is now live online, running until 23 December. No blog last week, because it was my birthday, and a very nice day it was, too, sunshine and barbecued chicken tikka on skewers.
Last week I was rummaging around in my web albums looking for something which was nothing at all to do with this drawing, but it caught my eye and I fished it out and put it in my iPad photos. That was just as well, because now I can find neither the photo in the web album nor the original of this forgotten drawing. It was obviously photographed in a sketch pad, and I think I know which one (2015) but I have hunted through all of them now and it just doesn't seem to exist any more. Anyway, it caught my eye, probably because I have been doing so much work inspired by the Voynich manuscript in my illustration work recently. There are the large, ink leaves leading down into a taproot which extends along the bottom of the page then, from a balloon shaped bulb on insignificant plant shoot rises upwards nearly to the top. The section at the very bottom of the page interests me most of all, where there is a line of asemic text running above the taproot, and some loopy, curly striped letters made out of smaller roots. It really is a lot of fun, and more where I want to be in my work just now. I am collecting bits and pieces together for when I start some new work once the illustrations for children's book is finished. It's starting to get quite exciting. Three delightfully creepy photos of roots in jars - my avocado pits of course, but these photos remind me of a really creepy museum my art school friends and I used to visit in the later half of the 70s to make drawings of weird curiosities in jars lined up in vitrines. I think of it often, but I'm not sure which museum it was; I remember it being quite close to the art school in Lauriston Place. There were some fairly gruesome things there, which seemed to glow with an unearthly light in the dim halls. I recently tried to discover more about the museum, and I think it may have been the Surgeons' Hall in Nicholson Square - although nowadays it looks so big and bright and posh I can't imagine a bunch of scruffy art students being let in to sketch the exhibits! I have been planning to make some work based on the beautiful ice patterns which formed on our garden table back in early December, but I've been finding it difficult to find a way of approaching it. The photos I took at the time were too mystifying and I couldn't make out what was going on, so I took the decision to begin with tracing a photo I took that morning on my iPad to get to the bottom of it - an unusual decision for me.
Still wanting to draw music, I made a start on both options proposed last week. I prepared some small sheets of Japanese papers with monotype 'staffs' in printing ink mixed to a warm brown which works well on both the ivory and buff papers, using a ruler for some, and wonky freehand for others. These will be worked over in pen. I also tried pencil on paper from the vintage music manuscript jotter I found. Just as my first attempts with a pen, pencil doesn't really work either. I thought my marks were weird until I found the characters worked better without the comic-strip style shading I normally use. At first it was frustrating, but the advantage of using pencil is the ability to erase, so I kept reworking characters over and over until they began to develop into the vision in my head. I discovered the old manuscript paper is very strong and withstood constant rubbing out, which I know for a fact I can't do with the Japanese paper I normally use. However, as far as the vintage manuscript paper goes the verdict is that the pencil work is too pale and indistinct, the opposite of my first attempts with a pen which were heavy and clumpy. I keep almost-spent pens which produce various pale greys; using one of those may be an option if I want to work on the manuscript pages but to be honest, I think the monotypes are the way to go for now. The Japanese paper is beautiful and the staffs in monotype expressive and exciting. I accidentally worked one on the 'wrong side' of the paper which was lovely, taking the ink in a way I like, so I prepared a few more of those. I already know my pens draw well on it because I tested both sides of paper samples when I was selecting which to buy. As soon as the monotypes are is set I will use pen to draw the characters I developed in pencil.
I should probably use pencil sketching in the time-honoured tradition more often to develop new ideas instead of going directly to pen on paper. Open Eye Gallery's annual 'On a Small Scale' exhibition is on the horizon, so it's time to get on my A5 mojo. Some time ago I found an old pad of blank manuscript paper in the house amongst a heap of music books. I found the pale blue-grey, thin, mechanical lines of the staffs on creamy paper exciting, full of the possibilities of unheard melodies played on strange instruments. I decided to keep it for drawing. I began a test piece over the weekend, thinking I could perhaps make something for the exhibition, but things didn't go quite as I had imagined. I began by sprinkling small watercolour dots over the surface in a manifestation of unfettered notation, a sort of musical asemic text. All was good at this point, but when I began drawing it didn't go so well. The paper is smooth with little bite, it absorbs more ink than the Japanese paper I normally use, and there isn't enough control of the pen pressure so my marks look rather clumsy. I began to overthink the reference to music and nothing looked like the picture I had in my head. I prefer the watercolour dots on their own. They dried in tiny crisp dots with fine, darker halos, but the pen-work is out of harmony in every sense. A fine technical pencil may work better, so here's the plan:
1. Try again on the found manuscript paper using technical pencil 2. Prepare for drawings with hand-drawn monotype staffs on Japanese paper It means mechanical staffs v. hand-drawn; both have equal appeal. I have a feeling the monotype/drawing option may be best for the exhibition, as the pencil option may look like a blank sheet from a distance - but is that a problem? I have never shied away from work which doesn't shout, but whispers. Just one small section to go now! I'm not even going to think about messing it up at this stage.
I'm not going to complain about free websites but Weebly logged me out while writing this post and everything I had written was lost, not even saved as a draft, and I don't have time to rewrite. Crapola. Lesson to self: write content in a different app, then copy and paste. Grr. It was a slow week as far as work went. The weather turned horribly cold - and it was my birthday yesterday! That turned out to be a very busy day, and for a couple of days before that I did a lot of housework, laundry and ironing (bed sheets, not the drawing this time, although it does need it). I also began the week pattern-making a new design, see my Binky McKee blog for that if you fancy a look. Apologies for the awful lighting, that's a Scottish spring evening for you, for the weather took a turn for the better today meaning it's warmer, thank goodness, but big black clouds on one side of the sky and brilliant sunshine on the other. Really hard to get even lighting under the circumstances. I got in a good few hours' drawing today so here is the top section of the work gradually creeping across. I'll post a progress pic of the whole sheet when the light improves enough to get a good photo, at the moment when I try the top half looks creamy and the bottom half is burnt out with bright light. It feels as though the drawing is coming along in steps, which brings me to - the film The Thirty-Nine Steps. I have seen both versions half a dozen times each, but I have never read the book by John Buchan. However, I've been listening to an excellent reading of it on BBC Sounds in the audiobook section while working on this, what a ripping yarn! - but I would swear half of it isn't even in the films, in fact I don't know where the story line for the film came from. So far I haven't found any mention of wet stockings, sex interest, or the bridge in Killin (close to where I used to live) at all, yet the tale has us already returned from Scotland to London.
I continued with a bit of sketchbook work at the beginning of the week, following on from the experimental drawing I posted last weekend, trying a few different approaches to the brick drawings. You'll see the book is increasingly held together with tape because it's much easier to remove the page to work this kind of drawing; I need to keep turning the paper around without the book getting in the way and I get a better wrist position with the paper flat on the drawing board. It suggested the mosaic approach was good for this drawing, above is a small section I worked after the sketchbook drawings. I'm still very interested in a 3D approach for another drawing, perhaps with triffids growing out from it. Below shows the progress across the whole sheet to date, it's feeling very exciting.
Above is a detail of the small preparatory drawing I made in 2015 for Before There Were Saturdays. I have it hanging in a frame in my workroom and recently the more I look at the top section pictured here, the more I want to apply this way of drawing to the Architect's Garden ideas. I'm not sure why, but I'm thinking a lot again about the zoological engravings of Ernst Haeckel; perhaps because of their symmetry and structure, which suggest a certain kind of architecture. As well as the architectural interest I am curious to start using the whippy, scribbly shapes pictured above on the left, which were experiments in a sketchbook of 2015.
I think there is another reason for the urge to get onto work like this again: I have been very busy starting a new set of very painterly small floral Binky McKee work with monsters and funny dogs (on those papers I was preparing the other day) which I am loving to bits, but as a balance to all the joy and figuration libre my patient side feels inclined to start something altogether slower and more rational - that's the beauty of being two artists instead of just one, you get to do the best of everything. It's restful and refreshing to change things about, and seems to benefit both disciplines. Preparing papers for painting this week it was lovely to work with real, smelly materials again. A mixture of monotype, tonking, scumbling and colour washes filled my work space with the wonderful aromas of printing ink, white spirit, and damp paper - music to my nose, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor, infinitely preferable to so-called room fresheners. I am adding extra texture to my primer in the form of whiting, much as I used to at art school when I bagged marble dust from the sculpture department for the purpose. I am told whiting is the same kind of thing as marble dust, but it's not quite as grainy; not such a bad thing, perhaps, as my student paintings often resembled sandpaper. I was a bit worried about potential adhesion issues, but I needn't have been because afterwards when cleaning down my monotype plate (a big slab of toughened glass) I discovered lumps of the whiting addition primer so thoroughly adhered to the glass I struggled to remove it with a scraper. The primer itself is acrylic gesso with high flexibility so there shouldn't be any issues with the heavy, card-like Fabriano Rosaspina I use.
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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. |