These pictures are fully personalised work of devotion and are packed with symbolic references. I usually arrange a phone call to kick the process off during which time we will unpack the layers to the picture and what everybody might be doing and wearing. I make a request for a mass of pictures showing me these things…primarily people, but also favourite pyjamas, trainers, yoga mats, house, trees, dogs, cats, rabbits, horses, racing silks, shorts, shooting socks…you name it. (I always beg for people to send me the pictures that they’d want to see, since I can’t imagine what I can’t see. There are a number of pictures that have winged their way to me, usually of children, with disastrous lockdown haircuts, often self-administered. From an artist’s point of view these are brilliant because they are VERY characterful, however, not necessarily something to be immortalised in a picture. Another person had amazing hair but was wearing a beany hat in all the pictures his sister sent to me.) Once the pencil sketch is approved I will then hold my breath as long as it takes to ink it with my black Staedtler pen, before colouring it in. It’s a labour of love and I usually have to pour myself a glass of wine and watch at least one episode of The Gilmore Girls to calm down, however late into the night it is.