I carry a sketchbook with me everywhere I go. I don’t draw every day, although if a sketchbook isn’t at hand I get irritable.

All my paintings start life in one of these books. They can often be a few rough visual notes accompanied by one or two annotations. My paintings are pretty faithful to these initial workings. So the early sketches are very important to me. Fundamentally it’s all about the drawing.

The crucial part at this early stage in a painting is the outer shape. It has to be pleasing in some way. If it looks clumsy then I move a few buildings around a bit, mark a few people in for compositional balance and hopefully it starts to sing.

Download a  PDF of paintings currently available with artists prices (7.5mg pdf).