Living Life Creatively — Where It All Began
I have been creative for as long as I can remember. Ever since I could hold a pencil in my left hand, drawing has simply been part of how I make sense of the world.
A little while ago, my mum cleared out some of my old university and art school work from the house, and I have finally been sorting through it. Opening those portfolios again has been a strange little journey back in time — old drawings, experiments and ideas that I probably haven't properly looked at since I was a student at art school in Dundee.
And amongst everything, it was my first-year work that I loved seeing most.
Learning to look
First year was probably my favourite year of art school. We drew constantly.
There are pages of observational drawings and life studies, alongside the slightly wonderful experience of studying anatomy and form using a skeleton. I always loved those drawings. There is something about stripping everything back to structure — understanding what sits beneath the surface before you begin thinking about style.
That year also brought something I was incredibly proud of: I won the Bill Cadenhead Prize for Drawing.
The prize was named in memory of William “Bill” Cadenhead, an artist and much-loved drawing and painting lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone whose teaching centred particularly around life drawing. He believed passionately in drawing from life as a fundamental part of an artist's training — studying structure, anatomy, form and the relationship between what we see in three dimensions and what we put onto a two-dimensional page.
Knowing that makes the award feel particularly meaningful to me now. Drawing was the part of art school I loved most, and all these years later it remains the foundation of almost everything I create.
Looking through those old portfolios, I can see just how much that first year still underpins the way I work.
Traditional drawing has always been at the heart of my practice. Even today, almost everything I create begins by hand. Pen, pencil, ink, paint. I use a computer for laying out finished work and occasionally making small corrections, but the artwork itself remains resolutely physical.
Finding illustration
When I arrived at art school, I was interested in Fine Art. Part of me always wanted to follow that path, but I wasn't sure how I would ever make a living from it.
After moving into Illustration and Animation during first year, I eventually settled on Illustration for the remaining three years of my degree. It seemed to offer me a balance between the two things I wanted — drawing and creativity, but with a commercial purpose attached to them.
Interestingly, looking back now, I don't think I ever felt quite as comfortable with my work after that first year.
Art school encouraged us to experiment — which, of course, is exactly what art school should do — but I often found myself wanting something slightly different. Rather than constantly searching for another way of making an image, I wanted to become really good at the techniques I already loved.
I wanted to draw better.
To understand materials better.
To become more accomplished.
It's interesting to recognise that now, because more than twenty years later, that is still very much how I approach creativity. I love experimenting, but I also love craft. I like understanding why something works and slowly getting better at doing it.
A street full of eccentrics
One of my later illustration projects was based around a street inhabited entirely by eccentric characters.
The idea was partly inspired by Oasis's She’s Electric and its wonderfully odd little world of characters, alongside this quote…
“The trouble with eccentrics is that they are only nice if you live on the same street, not next door.”
I created an entire collection of characters who all lived alongside one another, each with their own peculiarities and stories.
Looking at that project again makes me smile because perhaps it wasn't so far removed from the worlds I create now.
Tiny universes. Curious characters. Houses filled with peculiar things.
Although these days I suspect I might be the eccentric on the street — the one making ink from plants, collecting strange bottles, bringing shells and seedpods home and allowing creative projects to gradually spill into every corner of the house and out into my street. Just ask my neighbours about the little library in my front garden,
Some things apparently don't change.
Another project explored our greatest fears through printmaking — a darker idea, but enormous fun to interpret visually. Again, I can see little threads connecting it to the work I make today: storytelling, symbolism, slightly strange subjects and finding beautiful ways to explore things that aren't necessarily beautiful.
The drawings that disappeared
Sadly, I don't have any of my artwork from childhood or my school days.
My art teacher kept almost everything I made so that it could be shown to future pupils as inspiration. At the time I probably didn't think much about it. Now I would give almost anything to open a folder and see those drawings again.
There is something bittersweet about knowing they are probably gone, but also rather lovely knowing that someone thought they were worth keeping.
My dad also hoarded some of my childhood artwork over the years. I haven't seen any of it for a very long time and, with everything that happens over a lifetime, I don't know whether any of it still exists.
Perhaps somewhere there is still a forgotten folder containing a wonky childhood drawing with my name written on the back.
I'd like to think so.
But perhaps the important part isn't really the drawings themselves.
It's knowing that I was making things then.
And I am still making things now.
The materials have changed. My skills have changed. My ideas have certainly become something more... But that instinct to pick up a pencil and turn something in my imagination into something I can actually see has never really left me.
Looking through these old portfolios has reminded me that creativity hasn't simply been my career.
It has been the thread running through my whole life.
And perhaps, after all these years of making, experimenting and creating, I’m finding myself drawn back to the simplest place of all — a pencil and a piece of paper.
But I think that might be a story for another day.
What about you?
Were you creative as a child, or did creativity find you later in life? I’d love to hear about your own creative beginnings in the comments…