One early morning this week B found a blue balloon mysteriously drifting about our garden. He tied it to the washing line in front of our shed painted in blue; the different blues looked amazing together, so I took a photo which was a good thing because the balloon rapidly deflated throughout the day between the bed sheets I laundered that day and hung around it.
My guess is that a child was carrying it on her way to the local primary school, perhaps for some kiddy celebration, and had let it go and lost it.
​It put me in mind of the marvellous Ivor Cutler's poem The Shapely Balloon, set to his harmonium playing:

"Mammy, I want a balloon"
"A balloon? What do you want a balloon for, son?"
"To play with"
"To play with? Do you think I'm going to lay out good money so that you can play with a balloon? Certainly not. Start again"
"Mammy, I want a balloon"
"A balloon? What for, son?"
"I'm hungry"
"Alright. Here's thrupence, go and buy one"
"Thank you my mummy" ...

... "I'm hungry for a balloon. That's not going to assuage my hunger"
"Assuage? Don't you use these dirty words in my shop. Get out, go on, get out of my shop! Assuage indeed, I don't know what the younger generation is coming to!"

"Mammy, look. A thrupenny balloon. It's the right shape, but look at the size!"
"That's not going to assuage your hunger"
"That's what I said to the man, and he got furious and drove me out of the shop and told me not to use these words. What'll I do, mammy?"
"Why don't you sit down and shut up? Can't you see I'm writing your auntie Mildred a poem for her wooden anniversary?"

The full story is well worth a visit and can be found here .

I was most fortunate to have attended an Ivor Cutler concert at Edinburgh University in the late 1970s, it was quite the wondrous event.

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.

Over time I have made a few works inspired by the Voynich manuscript, but I have never before got in really close and traced an image. Working on my iPad made it a delightful and natural process. It was fascinating to trace the movements of an unknown hand from the past, a kind of collaboration with an unkown person (or persons) spanning the centuries. I was surprised to see how my tracing above actually looked rational and somehow complete, making a kind of sense (at least to me) that the wildness of the original doesn't. That may or not be a good thing.

I do ask myself the question, would it be so interesting if the manuscript wasn't such an unfathomable mystery? I love Culpeper's Herbal, too, but not to such a degree that I want to draw it. I can't remember when exactly I started using asemic text in my work, but I think that may also have originated in my interest in the Voynich manuscript.
Pictured below are some watercolours based on the manuscript I made in 2012. The photographs look fuzzy because the paintings are on semi-opaque Japanese tissue, so they cast a shadow on the mounting board below. They are animated and spirited, and impossible to photograph clearly. I was interested in weird roots back then.

This is really a Binky piece, but the aesthetic is so close to my drawings and there are no drawings on the go at the moment, so I am blogging it in this journal. There are bound to be crossovers between my illustration and design practice and my drawings because I am, after all, the same person and the disciplines do link and interchange.

There are no new drawings right now because I have my head down finishing that children's book (in fact, this illustration is a sort of by-product of work on the book). It's flying along now, its identity is established, and things are falling into place beautifully.

By the way, I tried switching to Wednesdays for writing my blogs, but consistently forgot to do it - Sunday blogging is so deeply ingrained in my weekly schedule, so Sundays it is once more.

It's been a bit noisy around here! Since the first week in February all the street lamps have been replaced, the pavements dug up and resurfaced, and now it's the road's turn for the treatment. It hasn't been done properly since my family moved into this house in 1971 and the road and walkways have been literally a crumbling patchwork of old concrete for years, bad for tyres and dangerous to walk - it really needed doing! This is the view from my work room this morning.

I moved my blogs to Wednesdays once again. I do a lot of work over the weekends, so it makes better sense to include that in the week's work and not break it up into the following week; then I promptly forgot to post yesterday!

So, here we are on Thursday, with a birthday card I have been making for our son-in-law Ben, who is a YouTuber and enjoys anything spooky, dorky, or weird.
This should really be on my Binky blog (and no doubt it will appear there soon, along with the rest of the card) as it is more in keeping with the Binky aesthetic, but honestly this card is just what I have made to get it into the post in time. A spell of cold weather immediately after getting back into the studio drove me into warmer rooms again, until better weather arrived yesterday. We are avoiding heating the house due to the astronomical rise in energy prices and it has been just too cold to work in my north room space, so it was back to hot water bottles and fleecy wraps on the sofa, where my headspace is different - so here is a slice of Binky for this week!
Hopefully I'll remember to post next Wednesday.

The vernal equinox has happened, the clocks have sprung forward, and we have had sun - this can only mean one thing: I'm back in the studio! Yes, even the north room where I work has warmed sufficiently so as not to go blue in the personal extremities when I spend time in there. One of the beauties of a cold winter climate is the abrupt arrival of spring sunshine and warmth, and the joy of getting back to work with real materials - there is now enough light to see pen on paper! The day I get back into the studio is an annual event - see last March.
So here are the first new drawings since the work I made in December - I'm thinking crystalline growth, volcanos, tectonic plates and schisms here. The image above is a finished drawing; below is a work in progress.

In these new drawings I am leaving areas unfilled with the 'shading' marks, which in this case gives a difference in tone suggestive of crystals and fractures. I would normally fill the entire form with shading, but at the moment I'm interested in a faceted appearance and angular shapes.
Speaking of ice and crystals, I am still pondering a way to bring the ice tracings I drew last month on my iPad forward into the physical realm. It's a question of materials, as I would probably trace printouts of the drawings in some way (truth is stranger than fiction) plus I want to use more colour as I go ahead. Experiments are required.

Further atrocities by Putin (I will not say Russia) against Ukraine provoked me into
making this peace poster. I know it is nothing really, but Ukrainian friends welcomed the support.
This, however, made me proud today:

"A group of 52 children from orphanages in Dnipro in Ukraine have arrived at their temporary new home in Scotland. 
The children and their guardians were supposed to leave Poland on Monday, but a vital document from the Ukrainian government was not ready in time.
They will stay in the Callander area, near Stirling, before moving to Edinburgh in small family-style groups.
Steven Carr from Dnipro Kids, which arranged the evacuation, said he was "ecstatic" to get them to safety. 
The Edinburgh charity, which was set up by Hibernian fans and has been supporting the orphanages for many years, enabled the children to flee Ukraine for Poland. 
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted a welcome, and wrote: "I know you'd all rather be at home in Ukraine but you'll find love, care and support here for as long as you need it."
BBC Scotland News

Last week was a passwords nightmare. Thanks to a Google security alert I had to change a few passwords, and me being me I ended up locked out of everything, including my websites. So this is a backdated post because it took me ages to get it all sorted out. B says it's because I am too impatient to wait for servers to write the new information, but I blame the two-part security process and my phone pinging and emails and codes and all of it. I got vey confused. Anyway, it explains the gap since my last post and is enough to make me resort to a naughty word. Bollocks.

On a more restful note, today is the vernal equinox! Lovely spring, lighter days and warmer weather on its way. So here is one of my favourite paintings ever to celebrate.

This year I am really excited about the idea of taking part in the 100 Days Project Scotland, but I can't find information about when the start date is, or anywhere to register for 2022 on the website. I know they started another project running from last year's autumn solstice to the approaching vernal solstice this year, but as yet there is no mention of 100 Days 2022. I know people in the USA have already started their 100 Days project, but in Scotland it usually begins on May 1 or June 1. I have signed up to receive the newsletters, so hopefully I will find out more soon; in the mean time I will just prepare to begin on May 1 and maybe just start it whether or not I find further information.

I have already decided on my theme to explore, 100 days of breathing, in the wake of the pandemic and how respiratory disease effects breath, the essence of our life on Earth; little sketches such as the one above have started appearing with notes in my diary and I am planning materials. It will be the first time I have taken part as Heather Eliza, I did it once as Binky in 2019 order to develop a cat-like character, which I had by day 53 so I stopped it at that - but I would love to go the distance of 100 days and see what happens.
​
Meanwhile, Spring is now truly under way; the sun is higher, days are longer, birds are singing, and this morning an early frost melted on the grasses leaving something like an early summer dew sparkling in the sun.

The forces of evil invaded the lives of hundreds of thousands of East European and Russian citizens on Thursday, robbing them of their peace, security, and normal lives. My heart genuinely goes out to all those people affected by this unprovoked and barbaric action on Ukraine: not only the direct victims of the assault, but also to the people of Russia who do not want this war and do not condone these actions.
​May we find aid and a speedy solution to this desperate situation.

We have the most beautiful big snowdrops in our garden. I think my mother may have planted them years ago, or perhaps they just sprang up wild and multiplied; the woodlands in the area are full of them, too, so it's a possibility. However, we are blessed with them and they are much admired by our neighbours.

This week saw Candlemas on Wednesday. I always pick a few snowdrops from the garden to bring inside for Candlemas, they are such a joyful celebration of the spring to come it is a real blessing to have them around. I always feel a bit guilty about picking them, but there are plenty more outside and when the snow and ice comes they get spoiled. Our house is quite cold, so they keep well for a long time in water.

It's never until they are arranged in a small vase that the inner beauty of their centres can be seen properly; their heads are bowed so modestly, it's even hard to get a photo of them indoors - here they are on the windowsill, still looking very shy. 

B has been clearing up winter accumulations of dead leaves in the garden and found a few spectacular Hosta leaves amongst the debris. He brought them into the house because he knew I would find them interesting, and he was right - the curls and colours are beautiful. I have a great interest in fluted and finned surfaces which flow around the form of an object. Once my eye was tuned in to it, I began to see such things everywhere in carved pieces we have around the house and was reminded of a previous entry in this journal.
The relationship of the leaves to the wood grain of our dining table where I photographed these wonderfully delicate beings didn't escape my notice, either. I have a number of wood veneers (which B also gave me) in my work-space which I have been planning to use in my work for some time, but haven't yet decided how to go about it. Perhaps I will find some direction now.
Previous works on wood veneers can be seen in this journal here and here.