This painting depicts my two sons walking along Blackpool promenade, near the South Pier, in the glow of a wintry afternoon. Based on a photograph taken in in the first week or two of the year, the painting was completed between January and June this year.

I was particularly drawn to photograph and subsequently paint this moment by the warmth of the colours in the sea wall and the effect of the concavity of the wall on the shapes of the shadows thrown onto the wall by the low, late afternoon sun.

The painting was made in acrylics on 17.8 x 12.8 cm (7″ x 5″) Ampersand gessobord. As it turned out, this choice of scale made the painting of my youngest son (on the right) particularly tricky. Positioning and painting his features with any sense of accuracy at that size proved troublesome from the start, and I was forced to resort to the use of a magnifying glass, which I didn’t find particularly easy or enjoyable to employ. I’m still not happy with the way I’ve painted his face really, but I’ve reluctantly accepted that it was the best I could do on this occasion.

I set out on this painting with the intention of giving it a relatively freely-handled, sketch-like quality and completing it in short time. Those good intentions went out of the window once I had transferred the drawing onto the panel using a grid. Thereafter, brief, occasional sessions ensued, with increasing focus on detail and brush sizes inexorably reducing in size, until the final stages, when most paint – as usual – was applied swinging my trusty ProArte Masterstroke 0 brush.