Tunnard mixed design and jazz when a student at the Royal College of Art. His first one-man show was held at the Redfern Gallery in 1933, by which time he was beginning to evolve a personal technique in large and small gouaches, oil and tempera on gesso of beautiful if improbably balanced forms in illusionary space - the equivalent of a Calder on paper. In 1938 Peggy Guggenheim praised his gouaches, 'as musical as Kandinsky, as delicate as Klee's and as gay as Miro's. His colour was exquisite and his construction magnificent'.