The other day I was playing around with a grille composed of Old West lettering again, I placed it over one of my drawings to see how it would look. It does have a feeling of looking outside from within. I was most interested in the shapes created between the letters, coloured around in black to isolate them.

I was honoured to receive this comment when I posted this work on Instagram the other day:

To me, your work is a really inspiring example of how to take a set of artistic questions, ideas, and feelings and truly explore them, rather than just skating the surface ...
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I was bowled over by this, not just because of the praise but because it came from an artist I highly respect and admire. Known as Daniel, please check out his Instagram  Graphopathy - it is fun and inspiring and very intriguing.

Titled Ball Game, this work is available on my Etsy store, listing here

This week I have had a push to get the children's book I am illustrating as Binky McKee well on its way to completion. Part of it was to create alphabets of lettering to make a couple of posters for the story in a Wild West kind of font. I became very interested in the spaces between the letters as I was making them into words. In my spare time I quickly threw together this idea in relation to my interest in asemic text and legibility. It made a fascinating screen reminiscent of mashrabiya design. I placed it over a photo I took of the side of a rusty, bashed up skip (when we were moving house two years ago) and some fascinating shapes revealed themselves. They almost look hewn from stone.

For weeks now I have been contemplating how people or characters might look in the templates drawings. The little figures above came out of the children's book I have been illustrating. I made this digital mockup with one of my recent drawings on my iPad and was quite taken with how the people look solitary and overwhelmed by their environment. They look like explorers on their Grand Tour, but the scene also reminds me of our local park where people are taking their daily exercise during lockdown. The entrance to the park is on a hill overlooking the park, and solitary walkers can be seen scattered amongst the trees and meadow areas. In that respect it brings to mind the works of Lowry, or even some of Henri Rousseau's beautiful works like Carnival Evening.

I spotted this fantastic example of four different systems crossing each other while out on our daily walk: the plant, its shadow, woodgrain, and saw-marks on a felled tree. Of course I didn't have a phone or camera with me, so when I got home I got my phone and returned to the scene. It was worth it both to have collected this image which I find deeply interesting, but I also met a beautiful little pug pup - his body was pale sandy coloured, with a black face.

Well, last week I simply forgot to post this. I did the same with my Binky McKee illustration and design blog, I left both posts in drafts and forgot to publish, so I backdated it today. I was most interested in these leftover pieces of cutout template shapes, strewn across a piece of paper - they really do look like a strange calligraphy.

Another six from the series of Indian frame rubbings. No new work this week, but I find myself thinking a lot about the templates works, especially in the night in that state of half dreaming. They keep appearing to me with figures in them - yes, people! - something I haven't worked with for years. I am interested in the idea and it makes perfect sense in the wee hours, but when I am fully awake the images slip away as soon as I have conjured them in my mind. I guess the only thing to do is try it one day and see what happens.

A number of warm, sunny days last week got me out into the garden, working in my pop-up tent. It fills up rapidly with art materials, papers, tools, brushes, pencils, pens and jars of ink and is all rather precarious. The wind at one point was flapping the tent walls so hard the whole tent was leaning and threatening to spill my water jar. At one point the jar of ink fell over, luckily inside an old, thick-walled leather satchel which has seen it all in terms of art material accidents - the lid wasn't on properly, and ink spilled into the corner of the bag in a puddle, strangely enough in exactly the same place which bore a stain from a similar accident years ago. Such hindrances I took in my stride - they go hand in hand with working in a tent, and I managed to power through a lot of work making frottage prints of two wooden Indian frames as a basis for riffing on the templates theme.

After the frame prints I made monotype drawings of some of the templates. Here are some of the templates cut out and thrown down on a piece of paper, ready to use. I thought they looked like a strange alphabet, flying up in the wind to form words.
By the end of the day, the remaining ink on the glass palette not only bore the residue of beautiful marks but had the perfect consistency to make monotype drawings.

It's my birthday today, and I opened an Etsy shop as a gift to myself - at long last! I will be stocking it gradually with watercolours, including these 6 from the week. When I have enough listings to make it interesting, I'll link to it from this blog.
In the mean time, I hope everyone enjoys the bank holiday weekend in lockdown!

I discovered a liveliness in the work this week, and was surprised when I began to recognise work from my past coming through. I am going to hark back to my days at Gray's in Aberdeen again, because something in the distribution of weight, tone, shapes and marks goes right back to then. Around 1983 we had a class trip out west to sketch the sea and mountains (I think to Tighnabruaich, I may be wrong). Following on from the monotype landcapes I talked about previously, I had begun to develop landscape paintings using lots of inky splotches and dark areas crossed by even darker spots and lines, but on that trip it really came together. Unfortunately I can't find any of those now, but I did refer to them a few years ago in a large sketch book, where for three pages I made little drawings of fruits using every mark I could imagine and a number of tools to make them, including home made quills from bird feathers, and my finger tips. I haven't worked this way for ages, and I am really enjoying it - it's weird how some things just never go away.

These fruits were ideas to decorate ceramics.

Three more new templates works in landscape format. I made quills from birds' feathers to draw some of the shapes, mixing the uneven, splashy ink lines with the precision of technical and mapping pens used on others, collage, and areas of tone created with repeating lines. They are probably the lightest, most free work I have made for a few years and I was pleased that they seem to connect to my younger self at art school. One day when I was studying painting at Gray's School of Art I had exclusive use of a printing press, and I made about 20 monotypes based on landscape drawings I had made out in the Deeside country near Aberdeen. I worked them with loose paint after printing, and it was a simply wonderful day, a big favourite in all my years at art school. Today I am delighted that my new works are reminiscent of those.

The first two artworks made as a result of the templates diary. They are on ruled sheets of paper taken from a vintage Cameron's Register of Class Marks, R.H. The book had never been used; it belonged to my mother, who was assistant head teacher at a primary school in Rosyth for 40 years. The sheets measure 21x34cm, or 8-1/4 x 13-1/2 inches as it was back then, and are ruled in charming light blue, dark blue and pink.

Nos. 99 and 100 - it feels great to have got this far with the templates diary. This, however, is where it stops. I have removed unused pages from the book to allow it to close with enough pages remaining to use for experiments and notes, for I am now moving on to make artworks in their own right which can be exhibited and sold.
Watch this space for new work in the next few days ...

Up to no.98 now, I have definitely decided to stop the templates diary in favour of making artworks in their own right once I have reached 100. I'll continue with the book itself as a sketchbook for experiments, rather than a diary, as I have several ideas lined up to try - at least, for as long as the book can be closed, it's already bulky with so much thick paint and collage.

If you visited this page earlier and saw an image of a cushion here instead of these drawings, it was because of a weird bug which confuses images from this blog with ones from my illustration and design blog at Binky McKee if they have the same title (i.e. the date posted). I must get more inventive with my titling! It's comforting to see there are other kinds of bugs than coronavirus around at the moment.
​I couldn't believe it when I noticed I have been doing these for 15 weeks now ...