All my work is in pastel. I use mainly ‘Unison’ pastels and have an enormous range of them in all colours. My pastel box is a thing of beauty in itself! For animals, I work on ‘Sennelier’ pastel board, the surface of which is like a fine emery board. This takes the soft quality of the pastels beautifully and is a marvellous ground for fur of all textures.
For people I use ‘Canson’ paper but offer a choice of pastel, monotone or full colour. For the very young, ‘sanguine’or ‘terracotta’ pencil is a sympathetic and minimal approach which can suit perfectly the flawlessness of a very young face. Older children and adult faces carry full colour more easily.
Because colour is so important to me and light affects colour, I am fussy about the quality of light in which I work. My studio has excellent north light. I never work under electric light.
I work naturally at a scale of approximately 2/3 life size although horses, being so large, tend to be a little less.
This means that once framed a portrait will be from:
45cm x 55cm for a small dog
60cm x 75cm for a typical child or horse.
I also do full size people portraits which once framed are about 85cm x 105cm.
When drawing people, I will book a couple of sittings with each subject in their own home. The first will be spent sketching different poses before settling on, and working on, a preferred one.
I also take photographs. I then return to my studio with the early stages of the portrait underway and continue to work on it. I will later return for a second sitting. Only occasionally will a third be required.
Children’s portraits frequently take a long time to complete due to the difficulty of fitting the sittings into the school holiday times and weekends.
For portraits of horses, I will visit and spend an hour or so with the horse. I will sketch it, make colour notes and photograph it. During the photography, it is a great help to have another person present to hold it. Horses, as a rule, look their best in their summer coats so I expect to visit horses from May to September, though there can be exceptions.
Dogs are an all year round subject, and the same routine of sketching, making colour notes and photographing is applied. Again it is very helpful to have a second person present to help ‘organise’ the dog.
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