This is a good example of my illustration interests merging with my drawing interest. I took the crackled map-like photo from last month and collaged flowering vines and birds onto it.
It's more of a Binky McKee job and no doubt will appear somewhere in the Binky archives, but it perfectly demonstrates a collaboration - after all, I am the same person, and my life isn't all schizoid!

Here are some of those comet sketches I mentioned last week, mixed with little designs made from asemic lettering - I had forgotten all about this sheet. I often find little thoughts like this more intriguing than finished work.

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.

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.

Not my 'best 9' on Instagram in terms of engagement, but my personal favourite posts from last year.

This is a bit more of a Binky thing, but it's what's been happening during the week. It's the time of year again for some intensive card making, beginning with birthday cards. So many of our friends have birthdays towards the end of the year and at the beginning of the new year I kick off the season making cards for them. This year I was a little later than usual because my work-room required repairs to one wall, and when that was done I made it available for Molly to work from home for a week, and a lovely week it was.
This time I made little envelopes out of origami paper, with a tiny slip of paper tucked in on which to write the the birthday person's name. I remembered this design from my shop days in London. I used to make several ranges of greetings cards to sell in the shop, and these were very popular, so I hope the birthday girls and boys will like them!
Now I'm onto making this year's Christmas cards, a bit under pressure to meet post deadlines for Christmas and challenged ideas-wise, but it's always best to just start with something simple and something will come of it in the end.

I absolutely love the work of Howard Finster. Like many people, I first encountered it on Talking Head's Little Creatures album art. I was reminded of it while making the music drawings last month for Open Eye's On a Small Scale exhibition; something about the distribution and scale of the different elements which make up Finster's works is not dissimilar to the way I was thinking at the time, and I have been pondering it since delivering the works to the gallery.

I really got into 1930s book endpapers a couple of weeks ago. I made a few with the risograph textures I had been using for my Binky McKee patterns (above) and couldn't resist experimenting with a cut-out element from my recent drawing In No Way Pure. The result is pictured below, I had to do it by hand as I couldn't work out how to make a mechanical repeat tile (too much maths involved) but, hmm interesting!

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.