As this indicates, Uglow worked directly from life, and one of the features of his paintings was that he did not attempt to hide the process of construction. Remnants of the measurements he took and the drawing guide he used remain visible in the finished paintings. This was a process that Uglow developed from his early studies under William Coldstream, and it was to become a mainstay of teaching at the Slade School of Art in London tying into an already long standing emphasis on drawing there. The result was paintings that had a strong sculptural quality, but within the tradition of the shallow picture plane of modernism, particularly as it was understood by Cézanne, although Uglow's work has also been compared to the simple classicism of the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca particularly for the way he would make his life models pose in ways to emphasise simple geometric shapes. Planes are articulated very precisely, edges are sharply defined, and colours are differentiated with great subtlety.