HEATHER ELIZA WALKER
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28 March: Back in the studio

28/3/2022

 
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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.
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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.

31 January: Finned and fluted

31/1/2022

 
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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.
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Thanks for looking in, much appreciated! See you again soon ... 

27 December: Christmas cards

27/12/2021

 
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I reckon it's safe to show this year's Christmas cards and gift tags now, as everyone should have received theirs. After two design fails which proved either too expensive (cannot believe how the price of making a rubber stamp has risen) or too time-consuming to make lino-cuts before post deadlines, I settled on simple prints from a cardboard triangle plus the usual rubber stamp culprits. Printed on imitation Japanese tissue from Lawrence Arts, mounted on card. Although not as planned, the blend of materials worked well at the last minute.
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27 September: Drawing music

27/9/2021

 
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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.
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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.

20 September: Music and movement

20/9/2021

 
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A 1969 teachers' handbook which belonged to my mother, found alongside a blank manuscript pad.
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.
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Not going as planned ...
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.
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There is a drawing in here somewhere
 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.

22 August: New work

22/8/2021

 
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The first steps in a new body of work were taken this week when I made 16 frottage prints of plant life as the 2008 work mentioned in last week's entry. Using an inked roller passed over a sheet of paper placed on top of various twigs and curly seed heads produced the same delicate, slightly fuzzy marks. The papers used here are from Awagami Factory in Japan, chosen from a selection pack I received in April from Jackson's Art. They are an absolute delight to use, I think I'm in love! Delicious edges. (Paper porn, sorry).
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In 2008 I inked up the actual plants to make prints because I was using a 285gsm Fabriano Rosaspina print paper for those, which is too thick for a successful frottage technique. It was a lot less messy to make rubbings this week, using the much lighter papers of 90gsm; and now I have used up my collection of garden oddities, they have gone from the table top and my work room is nice and tidy again.

The umbel image to the right of the image below is actually on Fabriano Rosaspina which I still use regularly, used in this instance as a bed to lay the plant pieces down before placing the print paper over them. I wanted to include the nice edges on the prints. I kept it after the run of work together with bits of leaf skeleton and seeds which got stuck to it in the process, gluing them permanently where I found them. I like its vaguely scruffy look, and it will no doubt become something in its own right soon.

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15 August: Umbellific

15/8/2021

 
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Carrot top update - it did flower! No longer attached to the plant in its pot, I cut the triffidy bit off because it was draining too much energy from the rest of the plant, but it has flourished just in water. The rest of the plant is looking very pretty, with delicate frondy leaves and doing well now it has more energy.
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The process of its growth reminded me of some forgotten work I made years ago. I took prints from some umbels by inking them up with a print roller, then transferred the image onto paper by placing the sheet over the inky plants and rolling the back of the sheet with a large wooden roller. Then I began to draw into the prints - the tentative marks show the very earliest beginnings of mark-making techniques I use today.
I can just about make out the year 2008 beside my signature in the lower right corner. I showed this one in Perthshire Open Studios that year and a friend bought it. I then forgot all about it until 2014 when a I visited the friend's house and spotted it hanging in a frame in the lounge. I have no other record of this work than the above photo I took that day - difficult to capture though the glass in its frame on the wall, but I'm glad I have it. It took me ages to locate and dig it out of my photo album. The friend moved to France and then disappeared (I fear the worst) and I will most likely never see this work again.
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It was worth taking the time to find the image, not only am I glad to see it again but I mentioned in my last post that I fancied doing something different with my new work moving on, and this is it. My collection of weird stuff on my work room table keeps growing, and it's got to move on to make space, so I will try making some prints from them to draw on with all my current mark-making. I am excited about the prospect.

24 May: In No Way Pure

24/5/2021

 
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Last Wednesday I completed the first drawing for 'The Architect's Garden' series. I hit upon the title In No Way Pure by accident; I overheard the words "no way pure" listening to something while I was working on the very last segment of the drawing. I just knew it was the perfect title, with a nod to Le Corbusier and Purist architecture, at the same time as referencing the promiscuous spawning activity of the organisms in the drawing. I hastily scribbled a note at the time, but omitted to note the source.

The phrase may have come from 
Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes (Arena) on BBC iPlayer, but I'll have to watch that again to find out if that is so. I have no problems with watching it again as I have a Delia Derbyshire obsession. It could also possibly have come from Sisters With Transistors produced by Anna Lena Films. B and I purchased a ticket to watch the film on virtual cinema, but I feel that was too long ago (12 May) for the stage the drawing had reached by the time I heard the phrase. That's an amazing film, by the way, documenting the seriously cool women who pioneered electronic digital music. Even if you're not a fan of the musical genre, the trailer alone is worth a watch. I made screeds of notes in the dark while watching it which are pretty much illegible, but no mention of "no way pure" amongst them. If you are reading this off in the future (ooh, time travel - play that Dr Who theme again!) the links will most likely have expired, apologies for that.

Anyhow, I digress; as soon as I finished the drawing I began trying out some papers from the sample pack of Awagami Factory papers I received on 17 April. I have been itching to try them out, but wouldn't allow myself the pleasure until I finished the drawing, I just kept gloating over them until now. I used my main mark-making techniques on both sides of the sheets, pictured below are my two favourites. The labelled sides are the 'reverse' side with the 'right side' beneath; on the left is Kozo Natural Select 46gsm which is a lovely soft natural white, and on the right is Kitakata SH-16 36gsm, which has a most pleasant buff colour.
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17 April: New work and a paper journey

17/4/2021

 
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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. 
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28 March: Back to work with real stuff

28/3/2021

 
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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.

21 March: Paint! - and some calligraphy up there

21/3/2021

 
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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?
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14 March: The Architect's Garden

14/3/2021

 
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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.

31 January: Pasty pixels

31/1/2021

 
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A collage of elements is always somewhere to start blue-sky thinking. Things somehow insinuate themselves next to something else in a way I would never have consciously imagined, and a bit of serendipity never goes amiss in artworking. I spend hours in this happy playground, and the exercise steers me away from preconceived notions and drawing by rote. The image above is composed from some of the bits and pieces which I showed jumbled together in last week’s entry. I inverted the image to get some reversed colours to use, the image below displays it’s pastelly glory. (It’s all getting rather painterly, I may even have to get back to using oils again at some point).

I call this collage, but is it really? From French coller to stick, in its turn from colle glue. It was composed in Procreate (the drawing app with so much more!) after ‘cutting up’ scans of previous drawings and inventing blooms, so the only sticky stuff involved is digital glue. Pasty pixels rock.
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4 December: My work books

4/12/2020

 
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All my works originate in these books. I have a number on the go at the same time which span years as I keep adding to them until they are too full to take any more. Two or three are always open on my desk with a large one on the floor as I work. Over time they acquire nicknames, such as The Messy Drawer and Book of Materials. The Messy Drawer was the originator for my Confused Flags series for Artobotic’s Brexit Art Machine, the Book of Materials contains scraps of experiments with different media such as wax, inks, oils, metal leaf, and drawings made with unlikely instruments.
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Which one would I save in the event of a fire? Fairisle+Form Ol’ Scruffy, so many beautiful memories and thoughts are bound in the pages of that book. They are all precious repositories; dogs, snow, loving people, wine and golden raindrops, the car breaks down and you meet a hero. I don’t know how I would begin again if they caught fire and I lost them. I would probably have to dig around in the ashes, retrieving anything recognisable and make the ‘Fire Book’ which would be resplendent with singed edges, scorch marks and visible mending with gold leaf, Kintsugi-style “golden joinery”.

11 November: Card making

18/11/2020

 
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It's Christmas- and birthday-card making season, which I always enjoy. An excuse to get out all sorts of crafting materials and have fun with rubber stamps, stick things together with the hot glue gun, play with spangles, blob around with paint and generally increase the peace. I never have a single idea what I'm going to do at the beginning, but something always happens. I began completely empty headed, but as soon as all the bits and pieces came out and I started playing with them the cards made threw themselves together. It's so satisfying to see the neat rows of finished, folded cards.
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    Welcome to my work journal. I usually post here once a week on Sunday, but there are often 'bonus' posts in between of interesting things like growing carrot tops and avocado pits, the odd piece of work I do as Binky, and news items.
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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!)
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    Please note all images on this website are ©Heather Eliza Walker 2013 - 2020, and may not be used or reproduced without prior consent.
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