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.

I began adding brick structures to the drawing this week, using my Dad's old curve templates to reinforce the The Architect's Garden theme. I began by making mosaics of the brick and tile shapes which fit inside the curve shapes behind the floating organisms.

I began one quick experiment in my sketchbook, playing with making a solid brick structure from the curves. The first one here is a bit dodgy, and the yellowish smudge on the left is a bit of dinner - gross, I know, and professional to the end! (That would never happen to one of the actual drawings). I'm a bit out of practice since the 'Empty Spaces' brick drawings of early 2014, I haven't made any brick drawings since; but The Architect's Garden work has renewed a purpose for them combined with all the templates diary work I did last year, so it's perhaps time to brush up on my technique.
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I haven't yet decided how illusionistic I want the bricks to be for the current work, only that I don't want it to be 'clever' as in Escher's wonderful works; so there will be a bit more sketchbook work (sans dinner, hopefully) until I make up my mind. The decorative, flat mosaic style may be more appropriate for the drawing I'm working at the moment, but I may do something different in the next one. 

Below: Empty Spaces 3 2014, and a detail of the drawing. I did a lot of bricks back then! I forget the exact dimensions now (the original is stored in the loft) but it's somewhere in the region of 60x80cm. The materials are still pretty much the same as I use today; mapping pens and rotring technical pen on Japanese tissue.

A new drawing underway this week, progress shots above. I am using replacement tissue paper for the old Kozu Shi I used in the past for my large drawings. No longer in production, I used my very last piece of it a few weeks ago, and had already experimented and tried a few others before settling on this one. I'm currently drawing this new work on a half sheet of Imitation Japanese (approx. 50x38cm) which is very nice, but takes the ink in a slightly different way from the old Kozu Shi; wherever the pen pauses, a small blot forms especially if the pen is new and full. It's nice and characterful and I definitely enjoy using it for simple linear work and monotypes, but ideally I would like to find a closer match for Kozu Shi for the kind of work pictured above.

Then somebody asked me on Instagram if I was using gampi. For all my obsession with Japanese papers, amazingly I hadn't heard of gampi before - research required! I ended up on a fascinating journey and learned so much on the way, understanding so much more about why my papers behave the way they do, and decided to give some gampi papers a go.
My first port of call is always Jackson's in London, who have a wonderful selection of different papers, and where I always bought my Kozu Shi (in fact, they were marvellous when I discovered production had ceased and rang them up and hunted out every last sheet they had left for me, which lasted several years as I 'saved it for best'). It was time to place a new order with Jackson's for some more Fabriano Rosaspina which I use for Binky paintings anyway, so I looked for gampi and found they do lots! I bought a sample pack of Awagami papers which arrived yesterday, the papers are so gorgeous I was drooling over them all, the presentation of the pack is simply beautiful with lots of information about each paper and I definitely found two or three which I will try. 

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.
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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.

Sad news today. Farewell, Prince Philip, aged 99.

These pressed tin jelly moulds must date back to the late '50s or early '60s, they have been in the kitchen for as long as I can remember. My mother used to make pink blancmanges with them every Easter for years, the bunnies would nestle in a field of green decorated with flowers and little mallow toadstools sprinkled in coconut. As a child I didn't like the bunnies to be cut up, so when offered some I would choose just a tiny part of its foot (!) poor rabbit. The family of five moulds comprises two 1 pint parents, a big sister, and two tiny babies.
I don't think I have ever used these moulds myself, so this year I thought I would give it a try. I made jelly the usual way with gelatine crystals and orange juice (no need for added sweeteners) and filled a 1 pint mould with just enough left over to make a baby one, too.

I turned big bunny out onto a plate and garnished with shredded lettuce to look like grass and Dr Oetker mini flowers. I can't remember what my mother used for grass, I assume it was lettuce, but I must have left it next to the jelly too long because the orange jelly was infused with lettuce fragrance which didn't taste very nice! I don't remember that from my childhood. It looked very pretty and Easter festive, though.

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.

Oh yes, the indescribable joy of warmer weather and spring suddenly arriving meant being able to get back into my studio. During the winter it was just too cold to work in the north-facing room, hence the digital sketchbook of late. Above is a photo of a little actual, real, paper sketchbook I started for Binky's monsters and ikebana. The freedom, the mess, the fragrance of real materials again! 
On Friday B was working in the garden when he spotted a strange occurrence in the sky - a perfect lasso (or lightbulb?) made by a passing aircraft. Always curious about what the aeroplanes are up to I had Flightradar to hand - look at that flight path! Joyriding perhaps?

I have been pinching some of the textures I use for my Binky illustration on my iPad to mock up a few ideas for the Architect's Garden work. I drew a sheet of brickwork and trellis marks in Procreate 'by hand' (using a stylus like a pencil, Procreate being primarily designed for drawing) which look great over the rough stony texture of a scan of a monotype drawing. I collected scans of the templates work I was making last summer and a few other bits and pieces which can be used in digital collages.
Working digitally is a quick and convenient way to see if I have anything going on, but I can't wait for the weather to warm up so I can get back into my studio. It's too cold to work in there at the moment - north facing, great for the light about nine months of the year, but dark and perishing in the winter.

The other day I stumbled across some notes I made about a million years ago on Polynesian stick charts and didn't want to forget them again. I was busy designing patterns so I just grabbed what I was using at the time (hence the linen texture) and made a few hasty sketches - here they all on top of each other and full of digital wobble. Distracted? Me? Noooo.