Click link below left for full picture gallery of Matthew Cook's Atonement sketches.

FOR professional war artist Matthew Cook, being asked to do sketches on the set of Atonement was, to say the least, a novel experience. It came about after someone who worked for the film company went to an exhibition of work he had done in Iraq for The Times.

"She asked if I fancied going along to the set and doing some drawings. It was trial and error for both of us - I'd never drawn on set before and they weren't sure what they wanted the drawings for. But it was fascinating."

For three days, Cook worked from 6am until 9 or 10 at night, wandering round the set of the evacuation of Dunkerque, which was being filmed at Redcar in Northumberland. Meticulous about detail, the film producers dressed him in uniform and blacked-out the gold lettering on his sketch book to make it look less modern, so if he happened to be in shot it wouldn't matter.

"They asked if I wanted to actually be in the film, as it was a nice idea to have someone sitting sketching the chaos," Cook remembers, "but it would have meant I'd be static and I'm happier moving around."

He spent his days doing line sketches and taking photographs, adding the colour that night or in the months that followed. Having worked as an extra on Band of Brothers, he was familiar with the world of film-sets, but Atonement was in another league.

"When you stepped on to the beach, your jaw dropped: it was vast. And there were similarities to real wars: when I turned up on the first day, the beach was strewn with all this equipment - bicycles, abandoned uniforms. It was before the 1,000 or so extras turned up. There was just so much atmosphere. It felt like something big, something epic."

To buy Matthew Cook's work visit matthewcookillustrator.com

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