Figure & Portrait Work

Portraiture sits alongside the botanical and wildlife work as one of the quieter threads in this studio. It doesn't dominate the output — the crochet and the wildlife photography do that — but figure and portrait drawing has been part of the practice for a long time, and occasionally people find their way here specifically looking for it.

Life drawing and figure studies

The studio has attended life drawing sessions on and off for years. Not every week, not always at the same venue, but consistently enough that a body of sketchbook work has accumulated. These are observational drawings — pencil, ink, and occasionally watercolour — working quickly from a live model, usually in 5 to 20 minute poses.

Life drawing is not work that gets turned into products particularly often. The sketches live in the sketchbooks. They inform the other work, keeping the hand loose and the eye honest in a way that longer, more deliberate projects can stop doing if you're not careful. But occasionally a study gets finished enough to frame, and those do end up in the portfolio.

The purpose of showing this work here is less commercial and more about context. The botanical studies, the pet portraits, and the illustrated crochet patterns all come from the same trained hand. If the figures look like they were drawn by the same person who paints the foxgloves, that's because they were.

Portrait photography

The camera gets turned on people far less often than on animals and landscape, but there's a thread of portrait photography in the catalogue too. Most of it is informal — friends and family photographed in the same quiet, available-light way that the dog portraits are made. The approach is the same: the subject on their own ground, in their own light, without a backdrop or a strobe.

A small number of these portraits have ended up as prints. They're not widely advertised because portrait photography involves people rather than animals, and the privacy considerations are different. But if you've seen a specific portrait print elsewhere and want to enquire, email is the way.

Portrait commissions in watercolour

Portrait commissions of people do get taken occasionally, though less often than pet portraits. The same medium applies: watercolour on cold-pressed paper, working from photographs, loose and observational in style rather than photo-realistic.

The subjects that work best in this medium are ones where you want character captured rather than likeness pinned down to the millimetre. A grandparent, a child at a particular age, a couple at an event. The painting will look like them. It won't look like a photograph rendered in paint.

For a portrait commission of a person, the process is identical to the pet portrait process: send good, clear photographs — ideally outdoor light, not flash — describe the size and format you'd like, and we can go from there. A rough sketch composition is sent for approval before the final painting begins. One round of minor adjustments is included.

Illustrated pattern characters

There's a small category of figure work that crosses into the crochet side of the studio: the characters in pattern illustrations. When a crochet pattern includes a drawing of someone wearing or holding the finished piece, those drawings are made here, in the same sketchbook style as the life drawing studies. They're small, they're functional, and they tend to look like real people rather than the slightly vacant figures in commercial craft illustration, because they're drawn from observation rather than traced from a template.

This is a niche mention, but people do occasionally ask about the illustration style in the patterns, so it felt worth placing here alongside the other figure work.

Further links

The broader range of work from this studio — crochet, sewing, wildlife photography, botanical watercolours — is in the gallery. Recent finished pieces, including the most recent portrait commission, are under projects. If you'd like to commission a portrait in any medium, the pricing and process details are on the commissions page. For anything else, the about page has the background.