Continuing the clean theme, I began a 'collaboration' with my younger self. A few years ago I was delighted to find an old design I had made in school. It must have been 1972-3 because at the bottom of the sheet there is a small pencil note: "Heather Walker 2 G 2"; I would have been 12 or 13 if that means form 2 at school, although I seem to recall being a little older when the design was made into a batik cushion cover. Here is a detail of the original drawing from all those years ago. I have wanted to work with it for some time, and started copying it in the Yay Flowers cut-out collage style earlier this year, but it didn't work. It didn't want to be drawn like that and looked dated in the wrong kind of way, somehow lacking a fondness for the nostalgia of the 70s which surprised me, because I thought Yay Flowers looked quite 70s. I like the glow and all the textures of Yay Flowers, but perhaps I was already moving away from that grungy texture I was using last year and that's why it didn't work. I had a feeling it could just look dirty in print even back then. As soon as I began tracing in Procreate with a smooth, clear outline all the fun came back. I had fun separating a few of the main motifs and experimenting with flat colour; now it looks 70s in the right way, with a clean and contemporary feel. I do like the juxtaposition of the flat line and colour work against grungy textures, but I know it wouldn't print well on Spoonflower so the final pattern will have a flat background. The thing to bear in mind is that fabric has its own texture and there's little need to add more, and when I am designing for a pattern I have to stop thinking like a painter and not make 'drawings of textiles', something I have done lots of times because of my interest in them - see September 2020, a month when that's almost all I did.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! Comments are closed.
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Welcome to my illustration and patterns blog.
I illustrate under the pen-name of Binky McKee, McKee being my mother's maiden name. Binky was the name of every single cat my great-grandmother kept - allegedly about 40 of them during her 94 years of life. 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 binkymckee. with weebly.com and it will work again. I hope you enjoy your visit! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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I keep lots of scrapbooks and sketchbooks where I develop ideas and design little creatures. Here's a peek inside one ...
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As you may know, I am also known as Heather Eliza Walker.
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April 2024
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This time, take a peek into my ceramic design sketchbook. I actually made some of the mugs, but I kind of prefer the drawings! The plate designs are painted on paper plates, a most liberating process.
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These watercolours are from my pattern sketchbook. I used coloured wax crayons to resist the washes of watercolour, also home-made rubber stamps dipped in bleach then printed on crêpe paper - the bleach takes out the paper dyes.
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A sketchbook I used for mark-making with unusual objects - corks, seed-heads, feathers, home-made rubber stamps, my fingers and lots of flicky things ...
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