The Small Decisions Behind Every Painting

What You Don’t See at First Glance

When someone stands in front of a painting they love, they rarely think about how it came to be made. They feel something (a pull, a recognition, a sense of calm or aliveness) and that response is the whole point. But behind every finished piece is a long series of small, deliberate choices that most viewers never see. As a Scottish artist, those small decisions are where most of the real work happens.

This is a little window into that process.

Choosing the Landscape: Where It Begins

Not every beautiful view makes a good painting. That’s something it took me a while to understand. A landscape catches my attention for all sorts of reasons, the way light sits on water at a particular hour, the feeling of open space on a Perthshire hillside, the compressed drama of an Orkney sky. But the emotional or atmospheric pull of a place is what I’m really looking for, not “just” a pretty scene.

There’s also a significant difference between a photograph of somewhere and the lived experience of being there. A photo flattens everything. Being in a landscape, you feel the scale of it, the weather, the quality of the air. Scottish landscape paintings that have genuine presence usually start from that kind of real encounter, not just a reference image on a screen.

Composition and Balance: What to Include (and Leave Out)

Once I’ve decided on a subject, the editing begins. Real landscapes are complicated and full of visual noise, and part of the job is deciding what stays and what goes. A line of fence posts that interrupts the flow. A building that pulls the eye somewhere unhelpful. A foreground that crowds the space.

Good composition is less about recording what’s there and more about guiding the viewer’s eye through the picture in a way that feels natural. That often means simplifying quite ruthlessly, removing elements that are perfectly real but don’t serve the painting. When you look at landscape paintings for sale and wonder why some feel immediately restful and others don’t, composition is usually a big part of the answer.

Colour Choices: Mood Over Accuracy

I don’t necessarily paint exactly what colour things actually are. I paint what colour they feel like, which is a different thing entirely. Every artist emphasises what they want to on a canvas, and knocks back what doesn’t look right.

Scottish landscape paintings live and die by their palette. The colours of the Highlands or the Borders or the Hebridean coast are extraordinary, but they don’t stay still for long. They shift with season, weather and time of day, and I’m always making decisions about which version of a place I want to capture. Warmer or cooler? Higher contrast or more muted? That choice sets the emotional register of the whole painting before anything else happens.

Colour is also built slowly. Layers go down, dry, and are adjusted. A tone that looked right in isolation might need to shift once something else is placed beside it. It’s an ongoing conversation rather than a single decision.

Texture and Technique: Built Over Time

One of the things that separates original artwork from a print is something you can almost feel from across a room. Paint has physical presence. It sits on the surface, catches light differently depending on the time of day, and builds up a kind of internal complexity that reproduction simply cannot replicate.

Texture isn’t decoration. It’s a result of process: layers applied and partially removed, marks made and refined, areas of the painting that have been worked and reworked over time. Some of that history remains visible in the finished piece, and I think that’s a good thing. It’s evidence of the thinking that went into it.

Knowing When a Painting Is Finished

This is genuinely one of the hardest parts! There’s a real risk of overworking a painting, of tidying away the life in it by adding too much. Experience helps, but instinct matters more, and even now I sometimes have to put a piece against the wall and leave it alone for a few days before I can see it clearly.

A painting is finished when it has said what it needed to say and nothing feels unresolved. That sounds vague, but any artist reading this will know exactly what I mean. As a Scottish artist, I’ve learned that the moment you stop trusting that feeling is the moment a painting starts to go wrong.

Why These Decisions Matter to the Buyer

All of this might sound like the internal concerns of someone who spends too much time alone in a studio. And you might be right! But these decisions have a very direct effect on how a painting feels when it’s hanging in your home.

Original artwork with genuine intention behind it has a presence that decorative work doesn’t. It holds the room. It gives you something different to look at depending on the light, the season, the mood you’re in. Scottish landscape paintings that have been built slowly and thoughtfully tend to be the ones that people are still glad to own twenty years later.

Commissioning a Painting: A Shared Process

When someone asks to commission artwork, those decisions become a shared conversation. Clients often come with a photograph of a place that matters to them, or a description of a view, or sometimes just a feeling they want to capture. From there, we talk about colour, scale and mood before anything goes on canvas.

What I find with commission artwork is that clients often don’t know exactly what they want until we start narrowing it down together. They know the place, they know how it makes them feel, and my job is to translate that into something that can hang on a wall and keep doing that. It’s a genuinely collaborative process and some of my most meaningful work has come from it.

A Final Thought

When you stand in front of a painting, you’re not just looking at an image. You’re seeing the result of a long series of choices, made quietly and carefully over time. That’s what gives original work its depth, its presence and its ability to stay with you.

Explore my original Scottish landscape paintings, or get in touch to enquire about commissioning a piece shaped around a place that matters to you.