Drawn while listening to Radio 4 – so parts of this image evoke the Archers omnibus (hand) and other parts Desert Island Discs (background – Edna Adan Ismail is an amazing woman!). Though the new Philip Pullman book read by Simon Russell-Beale, which I listened to while drawing the main portrait, does not seem to have embedded itself in the drawing in the same way. Could that be because I was actually listening harder and looking harder so the two activities somehow stayed separate? Parallel processing…?

(Btw if you think I have a gloomy resting face, you can put that down to the constant stream of good reasons to be worried: climate crisis, NHS destruction, pointless Brexit blether, the orange one … but actually it’s just my concentrating face.)