Technique - To draw birds the way I want to draw them you first have to get close to them. Some times this just takes patience and cunning but more often it requires some technical assistance in the form of a portable bird hide. Of course things are never as simple as that. The first time I put the bird hide up it was in the garden near the feeders. It seemed like a good place to start....until the shadows and scratching noises on the roof made me realise that it also made a good place to perch. I couldn't see a thing.

Since then there have been some memorable adventures with my small canvas hide. Some involved chest waders and a small stool to sit on as the tide, and the wigeon rose, around me. Or there was a stumbling night walk through a frozen forest to set up before dawn overlooking a black grouse lek. But the best laid plans don't always yield results. I have sat patiently for hours and been thwarted by a `friendly' dog, or been unable to set up the hide on an estuary as the sand was frozen solid.

For wilderness species it often pays to adopt a different approach and travel light - living in a goretex bivvy bag for a couple of days tunes me into the landscape. If you have the right equipment and the weather is half kind this can be a very pleasant way to live. Out in the hills I am often surprised to find how moving gently and being patient, combined with knowledge of how different species behave, can get you right up close. And there is nothing to beat waking by a hill loch at dawn with black throated divers calling overhead or being woken by the splosh of a fish in the dead of night, to see the stars bright and mist on the water.

Back in my art room I prepare a piece of 300gm hot pressed water colour paper, the smoothest there is, and make a margin all round. This is because I like to tear the edge..... carefully.... when I've finished a piece, so that the paper is wholly in the exhibition mount, rather than the edge being concealed under the mount.

I start by lightly drawing the bird. Then with a 9B pencil I always complete the eye. It will generally be the darkest part of the picture and if the eye works then it seems that the picture will too. The rest of the bird is done in anything from the 9B to 6H, working the graphite into the paper with fingers, or with rolled up tubes of paper. Lastly I put in the background. The whitest part of the picture is the unmarked paper, with detail achieved by the use of a rubber cut into various widths, as fine as a few millimetres.

I always wait a day before signing the picture and fixing it... .just in case.