Artwork Tom Sutcliffe

"I have been sketching all my life, my earliest being various birds and nesting birds where I grew up in the country outside Johannesburg, greatly influenced by a lot of birding friends around me including Warwick Tarboton who drew pencil sketches of birds more quickly and acuratly than anyone I have known. My father was a very competent oil painter and art collector and that also gave me some appreciation of art from an early age. As a young GP in Maritzburg I invested in some art classes for a year or more and studied art books wherever I could lay my hands on them. Most of my early work was in pen and ink, later in oils.

Like most sane people I'd rather be fishing every spare moment but I find now – maybe a symptom of age – that capturing fish on paper with pen and ink is nearly as good as taking them from a stream with a rod and line. Well, nearly.

So my art has lately become a bigger thing in my life, not that it hasn't always been to some extent.

As a student, for example, I made a few bucks on the side selling caricatures of our professors and lecturers to fellow students and later, carried on with a few cartoons of my fishing buddies.
I do on-site sketches  in wire-bound sketch pads but I also draw from photographs. Taking a sketch pad in the back of your fly vest with a range of pencils is not something I make a habit of, but when I have sketched on site I have learned more about what I was drawing than I ever did from a photograph! And I have kept all those pads.

Artwork Tom Sutcliffe

Pen and Ink
I find this a very expressive medium and I do most of my sketches on high quality art paper or Primeart paper. The pencils I use are a combination of Rembrandt Lyra (HB to 9B), Wolffs Carbon pencils and Faber Castell Ecco Pigment pens sizes from 0.1 to 0.9."

The above is from Tom's website.