Welcome
Hi, I’m John. I'm an artist based in Scotland and I create highly detailed, realistic pencil portraits.
The artwork on this site is entirely hand-drawn from start to finish. These aren't photographs.
Feel free to look around - you'll find examples of my work in the sections below.
If you're considering a piece for yourself, I’d love to hear from you.
My commissions are open and I ship worldwide.
Current lead time is approximately 3 months.
08x11" & 16x12". People, pets, places, vehicles. You name it, I'll draw it.
Tiny, postcard-sized drawings with an aim to keep all the details intact.
Faces, nature, things from my head. A little of everything.
When I was around 9 or 10, my Papa (Grandad) had these two little bits of card sitting in a drawer.
On each was a tiny fishing boat. Dark. Gloomy. Barely more than silhouettes. Some old guy from the
pub had drawn them years before and for whatever reason, he kept them.
I couldn’t stop staring at them. I used to try and copy them, over and over. There was just something about the
mood they gave off. The feeling that there was a whole story buried in just a few rough marks.
As happens with life, that obsession drifted off as other things took its place. But I never forgot those boats, and
somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I’d come back to them one day.
Salt & Silence is based on photography by Adi Emal and measures 16x12".
I pushed the sky around a little to give the upper right more movement and weight, but kept the wreck itself
true to the original capture. Drawing this reminded me why I became obsessed with these things in the first place.
The boat obsession is back. And this definitely won’t be the last.
I’ve been wanting to push beyond working from photographs and see what would happen if I leaned into
what was already there — working from introspection rather than external reference. In that sense, this is my first true original.
The Second Order came from ideas and mindsets that have been steadily forming over recent years. For me, it’s deeply personal. But for those who pick up on it, it may feel uncomfortably familiar.
After years of drawing other people's pets, I finally got around to drawing my own wee girl - meet Bella.