I was born in 1965 and brought up in Largs, a small seaside town on the West Coast of Scotland. I found my passion to draw at an early age and I have continued improving my skills and experimenting with art all my life.

After graduating in Illustration & Graphic Design from Building & Printing College in Glasgow, I started work 20 years ago as an illustrator and I now work as a 3D Modeller using computer graphics.

Although I enjoy my work, my dream one day is to be able to paint full-time. I have painted for over 25 years in my spare time, working with a style which is realistic and sometimes merging into impressionism, depending on the subject matter. My ideas can come from many sources, the majority of ideas develop when I’m working on another painting.

I paint immediately, covering the canvas with a colour that will dominate the painting and then I begin to work forward. As I work, I think in terms of light-to-dark, dark-to-light, shape against shape, tone against tone, which gives depth and contrast. I then continue to work the colours of the subject and background until I’m happy with the general mood and feeling within the painting.

I generally don’t bother with preparatory sketches, if I have the idea in my head I like to start painting at once and resolve everything on the canvas, this can change as the painting evolves which makes it more exciting about how the painting is going to turn out.

I tend to lose myself in my work, I become completely absorbed, with every painting I try to create something special that cannot be repeated. I quite simply have a passion to paint and if I create something that can evoke emotions, movement, laughter or a memory then I feel I have achieved a connection between canvas and viewer.

Once finished I often place the picture out of sight for a few days and then re-visit it later with ...... fresh eyes to see how I feel about it and whether I can improve it in anyway.

When I leave the studio the painting doesn’t leave me, I am still thinking about it and how I can evolve it into something special. My mind is visually aware of every day life, taking in colour and shapes, watching how the light & weather can change the mood, observing people with their expressions & movement.

I store this information in my mind’s reference library and use it to help create my artwork. Art is at it’s best when simply emotional. You see something and you are moved. Before analysis or a full understanding, the viewer can just enjoy the emotional sensation.

Cartoons are another form of artwork I like to create in my free time. I have always been interested in character design and animation from a young age, especially the great talents of Walt Disney. So, sketching out cartoons then colouring them using Photoshop, is another great hobby of mine. This is a good way of challenging my imagination to think up different characters and facial expressions to help tell a story.