Matthew spends the majority of his time on the sketching and composition phase of a piece. Once the composition has been completed and the final product can begin – in his mind, all the hard work is done. At this point he sees it as a sort of paint by numbers project, this value here, this value there, as he already knows what it is going to look like so he can sit back and allow it to happen. He finds a certain level of relaxation in the repetition of the dense layering of the cross-hatching.

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