This handsome horse commission was created in watercolour graphite and good ‘ol pencil at slightly over A4 in size. I love watercolour graphite. Like watercolour pencil, it’s so easy to get the softness of watercolour whilst also creating harder cleaner lines, and really easy to layer onto with regular and mechanical pencils for even more depth and detailing, plus you can erase it relatively easily! Horses have been a passion of...

My latest commission was in A4 graphite, of an adorable snoozing tabby. I have a massive soft spot for tabbies, we had a huge bruiser of a tabby cat called Paddy who looked so similar, though woe betide you if you woke him up during his nap. I’ve taken a few in-progess shots for this one; I ususally work from sketch which is either directly onto tracing paper or traced onto it, then I transfer this to the final paper (in this case, Bristol...

I was recently commissioned for a graphite crow, with spread wings, in A3. I think the final result was pretty striking; I have to credit the commissioner for asking for an image that was ‘as dark as possible’ which I always had at the back of my mind as I was working on it. It’s a strange tendency we have when something is dark to draw it so much lighter, as if in trying to understand the shape we end up going in the opposite...

Before Christmas I had received so many commissions I couldn’t take them all! So i began to offer some pet portrait vouchers that would be small postcard sized portraits upon receipt of the deposit to be given as a Christmas card, with the promise of a pet portrait in due time. The first one of these was this very handsome dog; the card was completed in watercolour pencil and white gel pen, and the commission was graphite in A4. I only use...

This is a full A4 graphite pencil portrait for some friends of mine of the ever so lovely dog they had, Burt. This one took me a fair amount of time between doing my exams for my MSc and working my day job! I think I am most proud of the curly ear hair – progress images of this portrait along with some art tips were posted to my twitter account, if you’re interested. The whole portrait was completed with mechanical pencil, HB and 2B...