Wesley, age 52, meets with other members of his mas camp in a basement in Brooklyn all winter long, to plan and create the costumes for the next year's carnival.

I've been around the carnival practically since I was born. My father was a band leader in St Vincent & The Grenadines, so I've been around it at home since I was a small child.

I grew up looking at pictures of the carnival, of the people, of the design, so I got an interest in it. And then, as I got older, I got involved with helping to make them and helping to decorate, and it turned out I had a little bit of natural ability for drawing, and one of my father's artists kind of pushed me into helping him start sketching. By practicing and doing it over and over and over, I got better at it. I still don't consider myself an artist but I'm pretty good at designing and coming up with ideas of what the costumes should look like.

I'm sketching and thinking all the time: at home, at work, sometimes things come to me, and I put it down. That's how I work, I put things down on small pieces of paper, and I work with them until I get a finished product I like. Once I have something I like, I draw it a little bigger. We usually decide in the group what the colors will be, and then we send the sketch off to the artist to do the finished design.

My daughter is part of this group, she's our secretary, she's the camp manager. She's been involved with it since she was a little girl, when she was like five years old. And even before that, I used to take her to the camp, where we worked like this, and she learned and stuck with it.

Since I've been in it for most of my life, I have an idea of what can be done and what cannot be done, so when I design, I have an idea of how it is going to be done, before I even complete the design. A particular shape might come to mind, and then when I put it down, I say, OK this is going to be difficult to do, so I might change it to make it easier to do. But generally, I have an idea how it's going to be done.

The best part of it is creating something and having it more or less come to life at carnival time. Seeing the finished product is a rush!