The February sun has started swinging around into the house, triggering my early spring habit of going around observing shadows cast through glass. I find the light beautiful and so evocative I go around the place performing strange yoga poses in my efforts to capture them without getting the shadow of my camera in the way. This is a shadow of my favourite drinking glass I use for apple cider vinegar drinks (yum on ice!)
This whole week, however, was spent on beginning to set up a Redbubble shop with my Binky McKee Instagram illustrations. I have been asked several times recently if there is somewhere people could buy prints or cards or just anything with my work on it that I thought it was about time. I settled on Redbubble after about 10 days of researching licensing my work, other print on demand services, rates of exchange, currency, etc. I love Redbubble’s vibe and products, and they have a UK print shop which means dimensions and colour conversions should be less of a headache.
I am very excited about the venture, and the entire week has been spent cleaning up artworks, resizing and redesigning to suit the different products. I love the work, it completely satisfies the graphic designer in me, and it feels very positive.
I have quite a way to go until I can officially announce the ‘grand opening’ - I reckon it will take about a month until I have my ‘best nine’ and personal favourites completed to suit all products. Once I have done that, I am considering doing the same for my more zentangly drawings.

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

Once again I have ink-stained fingers from cleaning my Rotring technical pens, trying to persuade them to work after a long hiatus while we moved house last year. It took two hours of Saturday plus Sunday morning to restore them because they had been left unused lying on their sides for so long. There was ink everywhere, but the joy when they finally started running again made it all worthwhile! It was like being reunited with very old friends I hadn’t seen for quite some time. I find the quality of the line absolutely gut-deep inspirational and it makes me want to get going on new work.

The drawings pictured above are works I made in 2014. I was intrigued to find out just how far you could obliterate a word before it completely lost its meaning. I started working over my own handwriting as well as printed text (just like at school, when everyone fills in all the closed shapes in the letters in their jotters). I was intrigued to discover I could take it to a point where the text was no longer legible, but still retained a sensation of being text; something in the rhythm of the strokes and length of the shapes which were once words and sentences still indicated a system of language in spite of its heavy disguise. It was like looking at a foreign or ancient text, mysterious, obfuscated, yet knowing it had a meaning. I worked as a graphic designer and calligrapher during the 1990s, obsessed with the beauty and history of fonts, so it came as no surprise to me that I enjoyed exploring different ways to alter text. Besides which, I discovered some wonderful new forms! I also found out that illegible text is actually a thing, and has been named Asemic Writing (link to Wikipedia page)

Since 2014, this work has continued quietly in the background while I completed the body of work which became my Brave Oleander show with the Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh, in 2018. That exhibition was immediately followed by the house move and working on book illustrations as Binky McKee (still in progress), but I finally have achieved space in my work room and a timetable which allows both Heather Eliza and Binky works to run side by side. This is truly living the dream, I feel so lucky and privileged to be able to work this way. I have already started to incorporate asemic writing into my Heather Eliza work and it is very exciting!

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

I took an almost total break from unpacking boxes from the house move this week and immersed myself in creating nocturnal gardens; more Binky McKee work (I really must get around to updating Binky's website!) The bottom two images read like a cartoon: (1) Trees disturbed by noisy jiggling stars, and (2) Trees organising the stars. The Binky McKee website may not be up to date but I am posting images on Instagram, link here.

​Thanks for visiting! See you next week.

An uneventful yet busy week, and just like everyone else in the UK I am posting snow photos. The snow continued, and continued to fall until we were snowed in and immobilised. It was time to help out neighbours and pull together as a community. I made lots of soups and broths. It is amazing how much time was spent shovelling snow every day. Pavements and paths were impassible. Even the dog got housebound for a few hours when an avalanche fell from the roof, depositing nearly four feet of snow in front of the back door.

- Digging a path outside our house, where the snow wasn't so deep, to get the dog into the garden the long way
- The thaw began slowly in a drip-freeze pattern
- Daggers!
- Buried things began to emerge
- Avalanche from the roof
- Bubble bath
- Frog
- Owl
- My small drawings looking really smart in their mounts

Finally, I spent three days mounting my drawings to go for framing for my show in April. Deliveries of materials and food were delayed due to severe weather conditions. There were rows of empty shelves in the supermarkets. My work resumed at last towards the end of the week, and I finished the mounts yesterday afternoon.

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

Sheets of Kozu Shi Japanese tissue drying on the line after staining with coffee
Kozu Shi is the paper I use for all my larger drawings, plus quite a number of smaller works. It behaves more like a fabric than paper, lending itself to a variety of materials and techniques such as staining, washing and stitching. In spite of its low weight (I think about 90gsm) it is a very strong paper and can be ironed just like fabric during the work process or on completion.

Working with stains and washes does require a bit of care, however: cool water is better than warm, which I discovered during this process of staining with coffee today - I was too impatient and used quite hot coffee on a couple of these sheets, which literally turned the paper into soft, wet tissue. The wind got up, and the next thing I knew the clothes-pegs were still on the line, but each with only a tiny, individual scrap of damp tissue! The remaining sheets of paper were lying sans corners in the corner of the decking in crumpled heaps.

In this case such an accident didn't matter. The staining worked really well which was the main point; and as for tears, holes, or damaged corners, I usually like to incorporate those into the work as an 'event' which formed part of the work's creation. I stained up a few offcuts of Kozu Shi to match to repair corners where necessary, and got everything back on the clothes-line to dry. 

After bringing the papers in for the night and airing them, my workspace smelled like a wonderful coffee shop (one good reason to choose coffee!) I will often use tea, ink or watercolour for staining, but on this occasion opted for coffee because of its slightly cooler colour, and the fact coffee forms sharper edges to the layers of wash. I collect leftovers from the bottom of my cafetière, plus on this occasion I added a whole fresh pot - hence the hot water. I would have to research the chemistry to understand why, but coffee seems to size the paper in a similar way to rabbit-skin glue, whether I use ground or instant from a jar.

Thank you for reading,
​A big cheery wave and best wishes to you all!
Heather

✍️

Back in 2013, on my birthday, I decided to give myself the gift of a nice notebook and the promise to do a Daily Doodle in it. I didn't realise at the time what a great gift this was to be. It can be hard to make the space in life to draw every day: the day job, family, commitments, housework, cooking etc easily overwhelm your time and days can slide past with no work getting made. Making that promise to myself and always having my notebook to hand was a commitment which forced me to make the time to draw - and I hope I can be forgiven for saying this, it made me more 'masculine' in my attitude (my other half seems to find it incredibly easy to disappear into his work space and ignore the dirty dishes!) It turned out that each drawing usually took two days, but that was okay as long as they kept happening. 
Recently I came across that notebook and realised I had a little goldmine of drawings there which have never been published online; I think at the time I still had a Facebook account and occasionally posted one there, but I closed the account and now the drawings aren't anywhere, not even here on my website. I simply forgot about them - so I have decided to start posting them to my Instagram account. Rediscovery is definitely one of the perks of having been working for so long!
Thank you for reading,
​A big cheery wave and best wishes to you all!
Heather

​✍️

Hey! I'm still here. Frantically, frustratingly busy, but plotting out my next moves: here is a space rock tearing through Earth's atmosphere, attracting nebulous stuff into its trail on its way, and propagating who knows what. This is how I imagine The Beginning of Time As We Know It, and it feels like an apt metaphor for my life right now!
Thank you for visiting and see you next week,
​A big cheery wave and best wishes to you all!
Heather

✍️

​

It's something we were taught to do at Edinburgh College of Art, way back in the day (I was there in the late 1970s, I was very young!) Sometimes I just want to leave the piece like this - with little bits of ideas loosely taped onto the drawing. I hope one day to find a way to bring this raw part of the process into the actual finished work.
Thank you for visiting!
A big cheery wave and best wishes to you all,
Heather
✍️

I am delighted to be taking part in the Christmas exhibition of small works at Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh. I am showing this little drawing made in the past few weeks, plus two on the posts below.

At Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh

At Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh

A birthday gift for a friend. I had a great day at Edinburgh College of Art recently doing tutorials with the students and giving a talk on my work, almost forty years to the day since I first walked through the hallowed portals of ECA as a student myself. The students I met a couple of weeks ago were a great bunch, they made me feel so welcome. The first tutorial group I took really wanted to know how I make the bug drawings - time was short so I could only give them a very short description, but I posted a full description on my Instagram @binky_mckee - the account I use for illustration and other life style type things. My other drawings can be seen at @heatherelizawalker.

Since 1994, I have been making my own notebooks and sketchbooks. If I don't make one from scratch, I customise the notebook with  my marbled papers and do things like gluing envelopes inside the covers for keeping ephemera. They tend to be scruffy, rambling affairs, but they are all mine, and I never suffer 'first page angst' when starting a new one - because it was already begun when I made it. It's nice to be able to customise proportions and to mix the papers inside according to my current interests. Many are tiny, doll's house proportions - easy to slip into a pocket or small handbag for instant availability in situations when it might be frowned upon to whip out a sketchbook!

 
The other day I remembered a drawing I had made a few years ago in connection with the work I am doing at the moment. I had to dig around to find the notebook I thought might contain it. When I finally found it and opened it I was amazed to find a wealth of forgotten drawings which I had never documented or scanned into the archives I keep of my work. They were from 2012, and experimental and fun. I didn't actually find the drawing I was looking for, but the forgotten body of work contained the elements I was seeking, and I was delighted to rediscover the work and find it relevant to what I am doing now.
But how does it happen that work can get so completely forgotten?

Clear out the kiln room! Believe it or not, there is a very nice, quite large, Potterycrafts top-loader electric kiln behind all the junk. This is what happens when you don't use a space for a while, then clear out the house! It would be great to be able to see it again, and exciting to begin new work ...