One of my recent projects involved drawing a lot of different hearts. I had fun experimenting with styles and patterns but my favourite were a set made up of biscuits, flowers and sweets. The hearts themselves were only around 8cm wide but there was a fair bit of work that went into each one and I thought it might be nice to share a bit about my artistic process with you.

I knew I wanted each heart to be colourful and imagined the 'sweetheart' (geddit?) to be crammed with old fashioned favourites. Naturally (and purely for the sake of research... ) I made a beeline for our local sweetshop, scanned the shelves and bought a plentiful supply. Then, back home, I drew a heart outline in pencil and filled both it and my stomach with pick 'n' mix.

The next stage was to start going over all the pencil with black pen – I used one with waterproof ink and a very fine tip.

Then it was time to add the colour. This might seem like the easy bit but it actually required a lot of time and patience because I was working on a really small scale and each individual sweet needed to be shaded and highlighted. I didn't want to just add blocks of colour and have the final image look flat. It took me several hours (actually I think I split it over two days because my eyes were going a bit funny!) but it was very satisfying. Almost as satisfying as eating all those sweets!

Once I had a finished piece, I decided it would be nice to have a matching set and so the flowers heart and biscuit heart were born. The process for all three was very similar but with the biscuits I reproduced a lot of actual types of biscuit (you might be able to recognise some) where as the flowers were mostly freestyle!

Mounted prints of all three pieces are available in my shop.