Euan Uglow made only a comparatively small number of presentation drawings which he brought to a high level of completeness. More often he made drawings as a prelude to painting. When exhibited, such works on paper were often called ‘drawings for paintings’. These were usually made in a single day, with much erasure and re-drawing; ‘I always try and give myself a whole day’, he said. His paintings were not made from drawings, and drawings were not used as documents during the process of painting. Much like his one-time tutor William Coldstream, Uglow rather began to draw a subject so he could assess its fitness to be painted. The outlines of a subject were settled and the relationship between the motif and the edge of the picture established. As his friend the painter Robert Dukes explained, ‘A lot of the later drawings are about figuring out where the model was going to be in the rectangle of the painting.’ For this reason he often drew a loosely defined rectangle round the composition, which indicated the proportions of the motif and its relation to the size of the canvas if the picture was to be painted. (Some of the artist’s drawings have numbers scribbled in the margins, which also pertain to the proportional relationship between the subject and the rectangular tableau of the picture.) Such drawings for painting are almost never completely resolved compositions. Those compositions that did not lead to paintings were put to one side, while those that did were finalised and brought to completion long after the drawing was left off and the painting begun.

Notwithstanding the frank sense of purpose in his drawings, Uglow’s draughtsmanship has a distinctive idiom. The pencil was applied with a mixture of sharpness and clarity, on one hand, and delicacy and hesitation, on the other. He laid special emphasis on outlines, and modest areas of shading were notably graphic and stylised with hatching, scribbling or weighted silhouettes. This approach contrasted with his painting method, whereby modelling was achieved with colour alone. Many of Uglow’s drawings also include what Dukes called ‘caliper marks’, short straight lines that follow the axis of the picture and that intersect with the motif, often at right angles: ‘the caliper marks might be to do with proportions as much as measuring. It depends on what the drawing is.’ These marks and plumb lines are often indistinguishable from the drawing of the subject, and as such Uglow’s drawings synthesise method and outcome, the way of working and the resultant picture. Praising Uglow’s drawings, the critic Andrew Lambirth described the ‘system which sometimes approaches Morse code in its decisive simplifications, and which at others throws off all constraints and embraces a lyricism both unexpected and rewarding.’