We Are Out of Office - The Highlands, Scotland

“Exploring a country by train is a great way to be able to fully focus on your surroundings. Watching the landscape go by, listening to conversations around you, reading a little. Arriving in the middle of a city without any hassle is a really convenient way of traveling. Also trains go where most roads don’t, which gives a totally other perspective than traveling by bike or car. The downside is that a train can’t stop whenever you want to stop. When we’re traveling by car we stop at any place which looks interesting.

Our train ride through Cairngorms National Park was especially beautiful. We really want to go back and discover that side of Scotland. Visit the parks, do some hiking, do some camping. We already suspected it to be beautiful but it blow us away honestly. This being our first trip to Scotland, it was a great way to make so many miles in such an easy way.

Our trip was planned around multiple cities, so for our artwork we decided to focus more on that part of the trip than on the nature we’ve experienced along the way. When we started working together all our work was inspired by traveling and the things we found along the way, we’ve always had a keen eye for packaging design on these travels. For this trip we felt it would be nice to look for that kind of inspiration again. To go back to where we started and revisit it in a new way. It felt like a very natural match with Scotland as a lot of things are still designed the old fashion way, or at least they feel like it. From the signing at stations, to packaging, to hand painted store fronts it all feels if there is a lot of labour involved. We decided to focus on these particular things and the work we made in the end is a painting inspired on a souvenir we brought for a friend.”

-We Are Out of Office