Welcome to my website!
My name is Jenna Martin Leitch and I’m an artist, illustrator and writer from Fife, Scotland.
My work is inspired by the treasures I find, in my everyday life and in the natural world. The joy they bring to me. The “happy” they make me feel.
I collect things; In my pockets, through my eyes, with my mind, and in my heart. The things we have lost. The things we have found. The sum of our parts. Through written word, drawn line, and painted hue; I make sure the magic is remembered and the JOY I FEEL is paid forward.
Still here! Not sure I officially said ‘Happy New Year’ to you lovely lot?! Well, I have now!
The last few days of this new year have been a lot! A Saturday at the vets, looking after my Dad, girls going back to school, sorting out my and my Dad’s accounts (oh the veritable joys!)!
The highlight has definitely been getting some miles in and some time at the gym for #TeamScotland for @myname5doddie @doddie_aid 2026!
My @werunedinburgh yellow tee matches perfect with my snood, and I have my Mum (as an albatross) and a charm for my wee Dad (a lighthouse) round my neck also, helping to guide my way.
I am part of a team for @anniekenyonarchitects back home in Aberdeenshire. I make sure and take part to show support for Annie and her family, her lovely Mum, and for the other people in the world for whom MND has become a part of their lives.
I’m stood, currently, in our home, my cat Alba on the table beside me (because rules don’t apply to her… apparently!) and listening to the rain on our roof windows.
The snow is dissipating with every rain drop fallen. A squirrel feeds at the peanut feeder, filled up for the garden birds who visit. There are snowdrops peeking out here. Waking up and rubbing their tiny eyes some day soon no doubt. Bowed head. Bright as snow itself.
I’ve miles to drive this evening, for football training, and so I’ll pack the car with requirements in due course.
Life has the ability to be simple, if we let it. Life generally, however, likes to throw spanners in the works, with inevitability.
Still, we continue. We always do. We are lucky for that.
💛
Big love all.
Jen x
#JOYimprinted
#akd
#taighsolais
#albatross
The moonlight this morning was phenomenal! 🌕
Cat tail in silhouette, to brighten it even further.
Beauty in the night. Which was my morning.
#JOYimprinted
#themoon
#gealach
A new year is never truly a new beginning, but we still feel it to be. We are quested to believe it as necessity…
Somehow, amongst it all, we are urged to create a ‘something different’ for ourselves. In with the new.
We are inherently tempted to embrace this, but in all honesty, I’m so very aware, that the year new, is merely a continuation of the year past. Not in a bad way, it’s an onward journey, which we can continue to forge and to sculpt, into a way of creating a better life for ourselves, and refreshing our way of existing.
Not new. But more honed to our why and our will. It’s a way to perhaps pick layers to focus on. Parts of us that need a bit more space to exist. A continuation. More in line with the values that we cultivate through living our lives.
As so, this next while, I know I have things that are within my controllable grasp. Aspects that will vastly
improve my wellbeing, and the weight of all that has felt so heavy in the last months.
There are elements of my and my families life, which, if actioned, can support us both in body and in mind. In financial capabilities and in our aims for this year moving onwards.
Doing our best, on any given day, is just that… us doing our best.
Something has to change… 2025 felt like I was standing on a treadmill that was going that bit too fast. It felt like a rollecoaster I couldn’t get off. I felt like as much as I tried, life was getting on top of me. I’ve spent so much time worrying about my Dad, naturally. He’s my Dad afterall. I realise now, as I have done previous, that his health is something I cannot control. It’s a fact that in its truth, has actually kept my head above water. It’s been a lot to contend with. Even on good days. Even on bad…
Amazingly, amongst all of it, it still seems I am still the ‘calm maker’. Still the joy bringer and the warmth provider. I am still an inspiration to some. I am still a guiding light in the dark to many. I help others to think with clarity.
I am loved. I am supported. I have an amazing little family, and the best friends along for the ride.
Tiny steps as always. Kindness in each tread. We head into the New Year.
#JOYimprinted
Hope lives in the tiny moments that catch us by surprise.
On a woodland wander back home, after my morning run, seeing these little shoots…
Snowdrops seeking light and life, rising above leafy covering.
Their arrival feels like space to breathe is being created also.
Seasons in mid shift. Awakening.
#snowdrops
#noticing
#JennaMartinLeitchArtist
#JOYimprinted
Yesterday I spent time with each of my family. My husband, children, Dad, our cats and my brother (on the phone).
It was a quiet day with little fuss. A whole lot of love and gentle joys at home.
I’ve found this year, that all things festive, have felt more emotive. More profound. More evocative of emotion and meaning. Christmas carols, candlelight, presents given, cards and letters written. Christmas concerts, time with friends, the decoration of our home, the magic created.
A trip home to lay flowers with my Mum. Time spent nearby where I used to live. Conversations and time outside.
Each part has felt so enriched by age and by years of Christmases past.
I’m now a Mum, a daughter with a Father so frail, and with my own Mum, who I think of often, and whom’s traditions are now so much part of my own.
Siginificance of spiritual art and stories of Christmas traditions across the world, have sat with me, and I’ve felt their wonder, and their history eternal, in my now. Like puzzle pieces all converging together, the days are intertwined.
Layers upon layers upon layers. Life is not one moment in time, but a convergence of so many moments, across aeons. Time immemorial.
It’s all felt more, bigger and, although not entirely ‘better’, definitely richer.
Then today, after a long and amazing sleep, I went a run, and felt stronger than ever before, in recent times anyway.
I found a nest left unoccupied. I found a tiny feather in my path.
I walked, rosy cheeked. Back home.
Knowing, that it all just continues. Nest and flight. Onwards. We go.
#JOYimprinted
#JennaMartinLeitchArtist
Early this morning, I stepped outside to put one foot in front of the other.
Stepping into the day, as night tucked the stars in, and sunshine woke from slumber.
The sky rippled with warmth, embers burning brighter, ignited by day. A sky fire burning. In time.
The light binds us and our way is brighter for it.
This year I have spoken of the darkness more than the light. One to the other. An otherness. Imagery ‘of the night’ has stemmed from my paintbrush and pencils.
These dark months. Days where it has felt so very dark; and day has met night more often than not…
The decreasing and the less. We light candles as if to fill the space. Add warmth and glow, where none resides, bar the moonlight.
And from hereon in, today, the solstice, the shortest day and longest night, the light will trickle back. Edge into the corners, nooks, our lives gradually, becoming illuminated once more.
I love the bright mornings. Quiet miles in sunrise daylight. Warmed and bequeathed by that early sun, rising in my sky.
With a year, and recent days, where darkness has felt more apparent, I am so glad the light is returning. However gradual, it will grace us. Grace my own days and life.
A lit path. A Holloway with light at the end of the tunnel. Awakened and glowing.
Lilacs. True lilac. Pinks, warmed. Silver, made golden. Warmer tones and a face bathed. Moths dancing, and butterflies thereafter. Following in their wake to similar blooms. Owls to garden birds.
We continue. We shine. As the sun does also. Night turns to day.
The Winter Solstice is here.
#lighthouse
#wintersolstice
#ofthenight
#nightturnstoday
The evolution of me. Of what I’ve created over time. Of what I’ve done. Become. Loved and cherished.
My imagination playing out over the last 6 years.
I like this time of year, as a chapter mark. A break in the momentum of time. Of tide.
Life lapping at the shores and ice forming at the edges.
A softening of the way we meet ourselves somehow.
In turn, of how I choose to show what I do to the world. To all of you.
I’ll continue… but, I’m so glad to have a few days home, with my little family, in the near, and mean time.
Go gently into the coming days. Step outside. Be with your loved ones. Find solace in the candlelight.
Move forward still. But with smaller steps, and on tippy toes. Quietly and with whispered words.
Jen x
#JOYimprinted
#JennaMartinLeitchArtist
#evolution
#JennaMartinLeitchWriter
I rose in journey, over summit, and in distance there they were. From other side, of place I know most, a comfort. A place, where horizon met memory, and I could feel calm ensconced in my inner midst.
A hill, still yet to be climbed, but which has been ever present. In my views. In my days. In my memories and in my homewards soul.
Drawing closer, the details more apparent. The snowy top in patterned dapple, where frost and frozen fall, was draped like crocheted blanket, enveloping its topmost peak.
With Folla Rule in front, in rear view mirror it sat, and watched over me, as if guiding me on my way, as I drove onwards.
Like parent, at roadside, waving me on until out of view.
A constant. An always.
Bennachie.
With flowers placed and words spoken out loud. With friends visited, and home reminded.
My heart feels more gentle today for it.
We do what we can, when time allows. Yesterday I made sure of that.
Love sent. Into ether and otherwise.
Ever onwards.
My Mither Tap.
#Bennachie
#JOYimprinted
#TiftyKid
One year 💛
A whole collection, bonded together within hours and minutes. Scattered between sunshine and showers. Happy times and sad. Travels and home. Memories and moments. 💛
My children. My husband. My family and my friends. 💛
I draw amongst it all. Paint pictures on paper and somehow try to document the way the world makes me feel. 💛
Tiny lines places together. Dots of colour intertwined with the water that binds them. As it sinks into the grooves of paper fibres. As it dries or sets, fixed for forever. My stories. 💛
Eight little images, my favourites of this year, clustered around me. Whom, in this world of JOYimprinted, is the centre point. 💛
I do this to send my imagination into the world. I do this, because, somehow, it settles my soul. And I’m so grateful for that… 💛
The art is not versus me… it’s a part of me, and I, it. 💛
Onwards. A new year. New stories. New imaginings to unravel and be played out, for all of you to see… WITH me. 💛
Jen x
#artvsartist2025
#JOYimprinted
#JennaMartinLeitchArtist
#scottishartist
“Onwards to pass home. Stopping as skylarks spotted. Rising from field. A flitter of wing, whirring in vertical lift. As they do… then song ascending.”
My Aberdeenshire, Tifty childhood home, surrounded by arable landscape. Fields with crops in rotation. Ground nesting birds. Stubble fields upon harvest. Grasses blown in breeze. The soft ‘shush’ as the wind passes through the tops of barley crops. The gentle vibration of seed heads, awns and spindle stalks, moving in sequence, undulating as if to dance.
The skylarks rising up. Ascending in sky song. Their rapturous shimmer chorus, cloud held, stratus, alto, cirrus. Sky Singers.
They are synonymous. The planted fields and the sky song… For me, intertwined and integral, to one another. One cannot exist without the other.
A few summers ago, I hadn’t heard a skylark. I was worried and wondered, had the Tifty skylarks left? Then, visiting with my children, I went a walk, and there they were. Two! Together in sky and in song. With the field in growth below… yielding.
Overwinter stubble fields, from harvested fields provide precious and perfect conditions for these groundnesters. For those that fly so high, they rest in lowest sites. When habitat prevails.
My wish, my hope, for them to keep singing.
Little skylarks. Vertical flights, and horizontal fields. Sky song…
A Harvest Song.
Our Harvest Home.
~ Jenna Martin Leitch
💙
I don’t like to wish my days away. I sit within the season. Rest into the dark nights and the chilly mornings. Light candles and wear cosy jumpers. Spend time, those dark mornings with my journal and a cuppa, and my cat by my side.
And yet, still, I think of those balmy days in the Glen of Summers. I think the dark, and the cold, makes it easier to really imagine and get a sense of the essence of a Glen summer.
Somehow, just now, it’s felt within touching distance. Thinking more of the Glen, because of Dad.
It means so much as a place to me, from holidays each year, but to Dad, it was his everyday. His childhood and his parents.
So many of his memorable life stories begin and end in the Glen.
It’s a magical place, and it whispers to me.
I don’t think I’ll make it there any time soon, but in the richness of remembering, it feels so close by.
As a child, on our own country road, then very quiet, and a place to play, I’d often stand upon it. Look up, look down… one way to the other. Left to right.
I remember doing this when this photo was taken in Glenlyon, outside the cottage my Granny lived in for so many years.
Life changes. Places evolve. The memories perhaps do also, to some extent. But, the feeling of standing right there, in that place, on that day…. It stays.
It has stayed for so very long.
That fact, although transient and ephemeral as the moment was perhaps, will never change.
We continue.
#JennaMartinLeitchArtist
#scottishartist
#glenlyon
#ballinloan
JOYimprinted
Both done & dusted!
My festive run of events is finished! This weekend at @perthcreativeexchange was an absolute topper! The best people, the best place, stowed to the gunnels with lovely and awesome!
I can honestly say I loved every minute!
To all who have chosen to spend their well earned pennies on my creations, this season and otherwise, I can’t thank you enough. Always blown away, always beyond delighted. Warm fuzzies all round!
My Etsy shop JOYimprinted is now closed until 2026! Any local folks to me in Fife or Dundee, if there’s anything you’ve been meaning to get, now is the time to ask! I can hand deliver on my day to day if you’d like! My website is there, but I won’t be posting any late orders until after Christmas. I need some time to be a Mum and a daughter, a wife… and well, just ME!
Feel like I’ve been hit with a tired truck today, but have been wrapping parcels and sorting Christmas cards like a demon, so apparently, as always, there’s no rest to be had QUITE yet!
Much love
Ever onwards…
Jen x
#JennaMartinLeitchArtist
#JOYimprinted
#scottishartist
