IT IS rather fitting that the first exhibit you come across in artist Leo Du Feu's new solo exhibition at Glasgow's RGI Kelly Gallery is a map.

Train lines criss-cross Scotland, punctuated with sketches of craggy cliffs and soaring seabirds.

You can trace his journeys from his base in Linlithgow to Dumfries, Girvan, Mull, Ardnamurchan and Aberdeen, all the way to Thurso.

It is the perfect introduction to a tour of Scotland's landscapes and wildlife, seen through the eyes of this talented artist.

"It's probably over the past 10 years or so I've got obsessed with it all," he smiles.

"I've always been a really outdoorsy person. I find the more you learn about nature the more you want to learn.

"Family holidays were all going out walking and cycling in the countryside.

"That's what I love. Increasingly in recent years I've been sketching and painting outdoors more and more and realising that's what I really want to do."

Thanks to a travel pass provided by ScotRail, the 29-year-old graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, who has received funding and awards from the Bet Low Trust, the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour and the Royal Over-Seas League, has been able to see even more of the countryside.

In return, Leo paints what he sees: the Ayrshire coastline from a train pulling into Girvan, the soaring turrets of Caerlaverock Castle in Dumfriesshire and endless brooding images of land and sea.

Against a background of dark, thunderous skies, a curlew flies low across rocks battered by waves at Aberlady, East Lothian. In another painting, an industrial-looking beacon is perched on a rock, washed by the sea off Ayr.

A keen birdwatcher, Leo regularly volunteers for the RSPB and British Trust for Ornithology. He says the more his interest in birds grows, the more he finds them flying, hopping and swimming into his paintings.

"It is fascinating," he enthuses.

"I find when you start to know about these things you start to look for them."

Birds are very much Leo's passion and some of his most detailed work is of puffins on the Isle of May, the first port of call for birds migrating into the country, after he spent a week there this summer at the Bird Observatory Trust.

Getting up at 6am, he headed out to spend the day surrounded by cliffs and birds, which feature in many of the sketches and paintings on show.

"The pencil puffin sketches are all done with me out there sitting with the birds.

"On the Isle of May there are tens of thousands of them, you just keep looking at them and when they're preening they all have similar shapes to one another. The more you draw them, the better your eye gets.

"Some artists I know just need to glance at a bird to see what pose it's doing, then they can remember that as they know how the bird is built and how its anatomy works."

Leo particularly admires the work of wildlife artists John Busby, Darren Woodhead, Tim Wootton and Keith Brockie, who was with him on the Isle of May.

All have very different styles to Leo, but he says he finds it fascinating to watch other artists at work.

"Even if you don't want to employ those techniques yourself, you're always learning," he says.

He is also a regular visitor to Waterston House, in Aberlady, HQ of the Scottish Ornithologists' Club.

"I don't get inspired by bright sunshine or blue skies, I seem to like dark and drama," says Leo.

"One painting is from a really stormy day and the sketches I did then have raindrops splattered all over the watercolour."

It's no surprise that Leo feels at home in the north-east, where ever-changing skies herald onslaughts of rain and gale-force winds along the cliffs of the coastline.

His mother, who is also an artist, has a base in Montrose and days spent together sketching feature in Leo's show.

Over on the west coast, a day exploring MacKinnon's cave on Mull, inspired another painting.

A bold watercolour of Staffa brings back memories of a boat trip made to the soundtrack of Mendelssohn's Hebridean Overture.

"When the tour boat approaches they start playing the music, its incredibly cheesy but it kind of works," he laughs.

Closer to home, there are sketches and paintings of birds at Linlithgow Loch: a great crested grebe, a coot and a tern.

"That's a spot I go to regularly. There is a little secluded spot I can go and sit, where people don't go walking. I just sit there and see what's going on.

"Although Linlithgow doesn't have dramatic landscapes, there is a lot of really interesting birdlife.

"I hope the exhibition and my work will let people see how good Scotland is. You can find nature everywhere when your eyes are opened to it."

n Leo Du Feu: Landscapes and Birds of Scotland runs from October 4-19 at RGI Kelly gallery, 118 Douglas Street, Glasgow. His accompanying book, Landscapes and Birds of Scotland is published by Jeremy Mills Publishing.