01
Challenge 001 · Published edition
After the Rain
A white croft, a passing storm, and the brief gold that makes familiar ground feel newly seen.
2026 · Digital mixed-media illustrationPainting a place
that never holds still.
I grew up in the Highlands, where a landscape can change character three times before lunch. Rain erases a mountain, light brings it back, and a familiar road becomes somewhere you have never seen before. I began painting because I wanted to hold on to those transformations.
My family moved often between small towns, but the landscape gave me a sense of continuity. I knew the purple-brown of wet heather, the silver line of a distant loch, and the way a white croft could become the brightest object in the world beneath a storm cloud.
I drew those places in school notebooks and on the backs of old envelopes. Later, a borrowed drawing tablet changed everything. Digital paint let me work at the speed of the weather: shifting a bank of cloud, opening a patch of sky, or rebuilding the color of a hillside until it matched the version I remembered.
I studied illustration in Glasgow, but I kept returning north whenever I could. At first I worried landscapes were too traditional, or that digital work had to look futuristic to justify the medium. Eventually I understood that the tablet was simply my way of looking closely.
Now I build each image from translucent color, broad digital brushes, and sharply edited edges. I am not trying to imitate oil paint or make a photograph. I want the work to feel constructed from light—to show how memory simplifies a place while making certain details impossible to forget.
“A landscape is never empty. It carries everyone who crossed it, left it, missed it, or found their way home through it.”
Today I work from a small studio on Skye, painting glens, sea roads, crofts, and mountain paths in digital form. I joined Apelles Editions because these places deserve to travel beyond Scotland without losing the intimacy of how they were made. I hope someone who knows the Highlands feels recognized—and someone who has never been here feels the pull to look longer.
