I had been doing digital portraits of dogs for a couple of years and although I really enjoyed the process and was very proud of my work I was starting to feel a little fed up with being asked if I could do “real” drawings. Pen and actual paper.

So I bought a large roll of paper and sat ruminating about what I could draw. When drawing the digital portraits I would be drawing in really close up scale, life size, pixel to pixel and I wasn’t sure if I could contain myself to small again.

What’s the opposite of small? I asked myself. Then one day the moment came, the hesitation vanished and I hung the paper from ceiling to floor and began to sketch an African Elephant.

With digital drawing it is easy to produce the first sketch, a case of tracing layers. For the elephant I had to make a choice, to project or to grid. I chose grid.

My digital portraits take a really long time, hours and hours of tight focus on the screen. Each pixel in the eye contains the pathway to new expression so it’s really important that I make sure to get them exactly right. Perhaps this is not so obvious when I say “digital drawing”, the implication being that digital makes everything quicker. For me this is not the case. I probably spent as long doing a digital portrait on an ipad as I did drawing this two metre plus elephant.

It turns out I can do ‘real’ drawings too and do you know what? I actually prefer to do them, sorry commission list!

So here is my experimental drawing, line by line. All two hundred and thirty centimetres of majestic grace.