Pencil

Above are a random selection of pencil sketches

I keep small A6 sketch pads in my bag ready to capture fleeting moments that I see. The two lower right sketches, one of a woman with her combs falling out of her hair & one having her hair trimmed, were used as reference for acrylic paintings in this website. See 'Opera' & 'Hairdressers'. Top left is a man on the MTR wearing a mask during SARS. The two men in raincoats lower left were in a computer arcade shooting at characters in a battle scene. This is a very small selection from the many sketch books that make up part of my visual diary.

Asleep on the Central line, London

Above is typical of how a small sketch is used to work up into a painting or relief, this is a direct copy from the sketch which was made while travelling on the London underground. Public transport is a great place to sketch people, especially at rush hour on the way home as people are fairly oblivious to someone sketching them, in this case everyone surrounding me was fast asleep.

Gwadar detail of working sketch for large Bas-Relief

Above is a typical working sketch for one of the large commissioned Bas-Reliefs. The close up section shows the desk with key characters that have been selected to put in the final piece. In every commission the people seem to be the biggest problem, from choosing who should be in the reliefs at all, the order where they are placed & then my problem of getting the likenesses correct, or animating them to look as natural as possible, as often I'm given static publicity shots to work from. To see the completed relief worked up from this sketch go to Construction Asia in this website, you can then see how some people have been edited out & new ones added.

Hong Kong Street scenes Wanchai, Southern Playground & Lockhart Road A4

These are sketches made when I frst arrived in Hong Kong, from a cafe with windows overlooking the streets of Wanchai where I sat watching Hong Kong's, condensed streets with layers of people, tall buildings & tiny patches of sky between. These were my very first impressions of the city, with the feeling of being an outsider in a new place watching everyone else busily going about their day.

East end traders Spitalfields markets

Above (left) is a delivery to Spitalfields fruit & vegetable market, the last few days before the market moved I spent a lot of time sketching in the small hours when the market was at its busiest all the big lorries unloading their stock possibly for the last time in that area before it moved further East. Above (right) is a man selling bananas off the back of a lorry, a big bunch for one pound in Brick Lane Sunday Market.