An exciting creative time! I have always found autumn to be a time of high mental energy and fresh starts, possibly because of the association with the new academic term. It’s a time of year I loved all through years of school and as a student, and still each year as it approaches I get the thrill. It brings double excitement for me right now: firstly, the Brexit Art Machines being installed in London for the month - and my Confused Flags are in the stacks to vend! I really am so excited! I am making more at the moment. Wobbly borders, misfit motifs, double-sided issues, foggy substrates and crossed meaning are my favourite themes, along with very some confused stars and stripes. Here is one of a star nudging boundaries:

These drawing are not by me, they are by Bernard, my partner, who is a painter and has kept notebooks for many years.
​
These pages are from my favourite notebook of his. They fascinate me because of his writing and symbols mixed with images on each page. I have been looking at them again this week in connection to my own work; his texts, diagrams, sketches, found objects and images combine on each page to make something as mysterious to me as the Voynich manuscript. I would like the same intrigue in my own work, using my unreadable writing and mixing it up a bit.

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

Images by kind permission of Bernard M Griffiths

The February sun has started swinging around into the house, triggering my early spring habit of going around observing shadows cast through glass.

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 gut-deep inspirational and it makes me want to get going.

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