This June I spent three weeks creating this ‘Scotland Food Map Illustration” as part of a personal project. Summer is always a little bit of a quiet time for my illustration business so I use this time to create my own projects. As I live in Scotland and have lived here for a number of years I wanted to illustrate a food map of Scotland.

I spent hours researching the speciality foods or at least local produce of the different regions within Scotland. My plan was to illustrate this map by the different shires (counties/states) of Scotland but when I started researching I decided this would make the map way too clotted, especially around the central and south parts of Scotland. Since I decided to illustrate this map based on Scotland’s local government regions. If you look at the map, the local area (counties) are named on the blue medieval style flags. I used the Scottish flags’ blue and white for the flag and I used a medieval type flag because overtime I think about Scotland I always relate to medieval history and medieval banners to represent different Scottish families etc. Maybe I’ve watched Braveheart too many times. That was one of my favourite movies when I was younger and it was my introduction to Scotland.

I was a professional chef before I became an illustrator and I worked in one of the top restaurants in Edinburgh. My restaurant always the vast majority of it’s ingredients from local farms, butchers and fish mongers. We also used a lot of Scottish wild herbs, mushrooms and cheese. So I was amazed by the richness of Scottish food. I never thought there were so many delicious and amazing foods in Scotland. In Taiwan, and I know this is very naive, when we think about the food of the United Kingdom all we can think about is fish and chips, Haggis, beer, whisky, afternoon tea with your pinky in the air speaking queen’s English etc. I never knew Scotland is one of the most famous seafood larders of Europe.

Edinburgh has now been my home for nearly seven years and Edinburgh is now effectively my second home so I always want to illustrate more things related to Edinburgh and Scotland. But sometimes with my freelance business I don’t always get the chance to illustrate things that relate to Edinburgh or Scotland. I always struggle to find personal time as I have a really busy life, especially with my 3.5 year old daughter who demands my full attention a lot of the time. I can only use very limited time when she goes to the nursery or sleeps to focus on my illustration business so as you can imagine it’s not easy for me to spend time on my personal projects.

But I’m happy I finally did it! I finally finished this Scotland food map illustration and hopefully I can do more of this kind of map illustration in the future. So far I want to illustrate a UK cheese map, a Scotland cheese map and a whiskey map.

 

These illustrations are the speciality foods from different places in Scotland. I love researching and illustrating these foods and I had absolutely no idea there are so many chocolatiers and shops in Scotland. I even bought a guide to the chocolatiers of Scotland from “The List”.

Detail images of Scotland food map illustration:

If you would like to buy a print of this illustration you can buy it here from my Etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/289476973/scotland-food-map-illustration-uk?ref=shop_home_listings