This is an acrylic painting from my Advanced Higher expressive project in school - it was a panic paint. Nothing like the clean cut, carefully plotted painting I had adopted as 'my style'. A painting that was thrown against the paper in a last minute scramble for a fatter portfolio case to send away to examiners. 

Out of all the work I've produced over the past five years or so, this is the piece that family memebers and friends have commented on the most and have encouraged me to reproduce. Work that's been sweated and slaved over for weeks on end is cast to the side alongside this painting...who knows why but it seems to be doing something right?

Now studying Graphic Design and being much less familiar with a paint brush, I've decided to dust it off and refresh it.

I’m familiar with Adobe Illustrator’s Pen Tool but wanted to give the Pencil Tool a try. Being free hand on a laptop without a graphics tablet comes with it’s challenges but it has a quality and technique you wouldn’t get from drawing as you would on paper through a graphics tablet. It gives you the same flexibility with anchor points as the Pen Tool but doesn’t require you to plot out each individual point, resulting in a loose, capricious feel.

Stornoway in polygons. Graphic designers love a polygon and after taking a 3D modelling class, I got to know them a bit better so brought them into what I was doing with the Isle of Lewis' main town. 

The first version sees the town against a dramatic sunset background and the second reflects the feel of the origional painting and draws your eye into the buildings' colours and intricate little windows.