A FORMER student union director has taken the step to become an artist after his hobby became work.

Chris Small swapped overseeing the University of Southampton’s Student Union for sketching, and it all started with Bournemouth-based boxer Chris Billam-Smith.

“Originally I was drawing TV characters from the likes of Marvel and Disney for the kids, nieces, nephews and friends’ children,” the 38-year-old said.

“I saw Chris Billam-Smith a few months later fighting for his Commonwealth title. I asked him on social media would he like a sketch to commemorate it and he said that would be amazing.

“A week or so later he came and picked up the sketch and that's where it started.”

After painting the boxer Mr Small went on to paint Lerrone Richards and Michael Watson early on, before a legend of the sport.

He said: “Johnny Nelson was at a Floyd Mayweather event, walking out I asked him if he would like me to do something with him. I did and that’s now signed and framed.”

Since then he’s painted many stars from the boxing world including Team GB gold medalist Luke Campbell and Roman Gonzalez, who won titles in four weight classes.

The latter got in contact after seeing a Bruce Lee piece online that Mr Small produced.

The list of boxers only grew from there with Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez and Oscar De La Hoya; who has two.

Mr Small added: “It's spreading out now and the plan is to keep releasing images. The fact I have paintings hanging in Australia, South Africa, Germany, the US is just nuts.”

Having no qualifications in art beyond GCSE, Mr Small originally wanted to just get ‘some stuff signed’ by sports professionals.

He said he would love to be able to work with Sugar Ray Leonard and Lennox Lewis, who recently retweeted his work.

Until a month ago the artwork was just a hobby before he started getting requests online for commissions.

“I could not fit it around a job, the plan was to step back to give me more time for the artwork,” he added.

Mr Small said his wife has been ‘really supportive,’ despite the dining room turning into a studio.

While he has predominantly produced artwork on boxing stars Mr Small said he is able to fulfil a whole host of requests.

He currently has art hanging up at David Lloyd’s in Poole and is open to commissions with further information and more examples of his work available on chrissmall.art.