KAREN TWEED is perhaps best known as a top-drawer accordionist — take a listen to her on YouTube if you’re not familiar with her work — whose technical brilliance extracts a lyricism and layered tonalities, often crossing over into the realm of classical music rarely associated with the instrument.

But there’s a lesser-known string to Tweed’s bow. Her passion for sketching has its roots in the art education she received in the 1980s at Leeds School of Arts.

After a period of island-hopping, Tweed settled permanently on Orkney in 2018, the year her father passed away. He was her mentor and she found solace in nature and observing its ephemeral manifestations: “Nature in Orkney is also a powerful healer,” she says.

Leonardo da Vinci, whose scribbles she saw when working in Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, inspired the “lightbulb” moment and motivation to graphically explore her own passage through life.

A Sketchbook: With Love from Orkney combines cutouts, notes, photos, graphic ideas, even cartoons and striking quotes like Mandela’s: “Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got up again,” or astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin on the excitement of that which cannot be understood.

But the book’s landscape sketches, like her accordion-playing, are stupendous — a sensitive and searching line signposts, in minimalist monochrome, empty expanses of land and skies with isolated, scattered dwellings.

Elsewhere, dramatic shapes and wild colours, boldly rendered in crayon and felt-tip, fill the swathes of evening or morning skies whose mad tapestries with nascent or dying sunlight against recalcitrant, rumbustious clouds are mirrored in watery expanses.

These accomplished watercolours capture the immense vastness of skies set against slivers of land, hamlets or sea. The infectious zest of Tweed’s love affair with Orkney and her quick thinking and spontaneity go hand in glove with an admirable command of pen, pencil or brush.

Tweed’s modest hope is to inspire introspection and offer encouragement “to write that story, song or poems and drawings that you have always wanted to, just for you.”

A digital edition (£9) and printed version (£27) are available from karentweed.com.