Dave Pollock

In Scotland in the 1980s and 1990s I produced line drawings for guidebooks and interpretive panels, and started to experiment with colour. I tried coloured pencils (Patrick Ashmore's Callanish booklet, 1995) and for years used waterbased felt pens (Sally Foster's Picts Gaels and Scots, 1996).

In Ireland in the late 1990s I used watercolours on line drawings (Cahir Castle and Rock of Cashel guidebooks), and in the early 2000s I started to apply halftones (greys) to line drawings scanned into the PC. Late in 2007 I plucked up the courage to colour on the computer, and whittled down the available colours to a small palette of working favourites.

In 2006 I was commissioned to provide sketches for a modelmaker reconstructing the medieval town and castle of Ferns, Co. Wexford. I started with oblique sketches, and progressed to detailed speculative plans, at 1/1000. Working at this scale, the gardens and trees become a significant part of the model, and research drew me beyond the arrangement of buildings on plots, to the spacing of fruit trees and vines and individual garden beds.