Sue Tilley, posing naked Photo by Bruce Bernard.(I)

Sue Tilley is one of the most recognisable muses in modern British art: the nude model with more than most on show. Now Tilley, who is known widely as "Big Sue" and who was the subject of Lucian Freud's 1995 oil painting, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, has taken up art herself and is planning a new future.

Tilley, 57, modelled for Freud during an important four-year period in his career in the early 1990s. Today, as then, she also works four days a week at a London jobcentre and until recently had been saving for an eventual retirement on the Isle of Wight, where she hoped to open a tearoom. But, after turning to sketching and drawing cartoons six months ago, Tilley has decided she wants to work as an illustrator.