Book Review : Watercolour Fairy Art – Sara Burrier

This is an art book that I have been contemplating about purchasing it. The illustration images are enticing and colours are really vibrant which I really couldn’t stop flipping through each time. The author Sara Burrier is an artist , illustrator and teacher and she loved whimsical , fantasy subjects since at a very young age. In this book she shared about very useful tips for beginner and intermediate level artist about how to find resources, drawing/ colouring tips and creating mood board for inspiration . I have never come into my mind about mood board which I guess I will do that in the near future.

There are many drawing tips , drawing tools and how to draw fairies in a more believable ways.By the way, there are more than 75 tips that she is sharing in this book. I would say, this is a fantastic book and even if you are not into drawing and painting fantasies, I think it is still a good resource for artist and non artist to appreciate her arts and painting styles. There are also other artists who are also featured in this book.

She also owned a website saraburrier , check it out if you are interested in her work.

The link below are affiliate link, which means I earn some commission from each purchase, but at no extra cost to you. The money goes out to support this website so that I can continue to create more arts and sharing resources to you who are interested.

Unfortunately the book is not available in book depository and can only purchase from Amazon.The cover of the book is different from what is shown here but I have checked it out from the local library that the contents are same.

Link to purchase this book at amazon :

Watercolor Fairy Art: How to Bring Your Fairy Realm Art to Life

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NEW ANNOUNCEMENT ! – 2nd Youtube Channel

Hello Hi ! This is an announcement to share with you here that I have recently created a 2nd channel which is call Yen’s Bookhive I have always wanted to create a 2nd channel about art books flipping and here it is ! Do check it out if you are interested in art books . As this is a relatively new channel and it is still growing, the books are still very limited, but I continued to stay committed to bring to you guys about more art books.

If you have any suggestion about any art books in mind that you like me to make a video ( I will try my best to find it ) , please drop me an email at ywong.creations@gmail.com and I will get back to you soon. Meantime, stay safe and healthy.

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Stress Over Painting

Flower painting always seems so challenging to me. And today, I love to challenge myself on this topic again. Indeed, I ran into some blocks while painting this piece which I like to share over here. Gouache is always one of my favourite medium if I wanted to have some thick , rich paint effect. But I decided to use watercolour for the sky for this round and I thought creating clouds shouldn’t be that difficult. I was wrong . You see, before laying down the first colour, you need to at least pre plan about how you going to create that effect.

Any wrong move, may in the end cause you to ruin the arts that you intended to show to your audience . Sometimes, colours can be undone, but mostly, it just stay there and any additional layers will worsen the painting and become muddy.

So I guess, the ideal move will be to leave out some white space for the clouds. Since, clouds are mostly white on a Sunny day. It is just unnecessary to add in white over the blue sky. By the way, the blue I am using on this painting is Daniel Smith Cobalt Blue.

While trying to correct the colour and at the same time trying to record my video was a total disastrous moment and causing stress to my overall video recording.

I decided not to overdo the sky colours and continue with the rest with gouache paint.

By the way, the photo reference for this painting was from pinterest. I tried not to get too affected on the terrible painting of the sky and move on to the Sunflower paintings.

Finished the final portion on the stems. And below was the final painting. You can watch my process on this speed painting on my youtube channel.

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Motion Gouache Painting on NIKE Sneakers Theme

Today, I am thinking of painting something funky and fashionable. I have done some research on pinterest and I thought sneakers are good ideas for some arts. So I decided to make another gouache painting again. And only after all my efforts done and uploaded onto youtube, I received a warning from youtube.

I will talk more on this later on this post. Let’s focus more on my art process now.

As always, I started to draft the positioning of my sketch to get the composition correct. This time, I have decided to make it a two spreads sketch and paint as I wanted to communicate more through my arts. The purpose of this paint is to show that sneakers are meant for all ages, be it hiphop, fashion , sports and more. The slogan always so true and the message of NIKE is so powerful and positive.For this sketch, I intentionally placed my subjects more freely.

I loved the colours of this HIMI Gouache set as so far. I didn’t have much issue about the colour mixture since the colours are sufficient for my arts. The only issue I think will be most colours had cracked.In fact, some cracks are more significant than others and some colours even shrink so much and it now left to 1/3 of the jelly cup. Other than that, I can re-wet them easily for repeated use again.

And now , coming back to the warning from youtube issue. In less than 1 minute after uploaded onto the platform, I received an email from youtube team . The letter roughly goes like this .

“We wanted to let you know that our team has reviewed your content and we don’t think it’s in line with our Community Guidelines. As a result, we’ve age-restricted the following content:

We haven’t applied a strike to your channel, and your content is still live for some users on YouTube. Keep reading for more details on what this means and steps you can take if you’d like to appeal this decision.”

I was totally stunned and quickly rewatched my video and trying to figure out which part had violate their rule. At the same time, I was pretty amazed and impressed that WOW, youtube actually was serious in every upload and every videos have gone through some vetting process with their AI tech.

Immediately, I switch my video to ” private ” as I do not want to meddle something that would hurt my channel. I started to go for appeal process to explain that my video should not be violating any rule since it is more towards arts and get them to review again.

After a few hours, I have finally received an email replying that they have reviewed my video and they see that it did not violate any youtube rule and they immediately apologise for this mistake and now my video is up and running without age restriction. With this incident happening, I told myself to be more mindful about making future contents .

I have made this video as #Shorts and I hope you guys enjoy watch the process. As usual, if you like my arts, you can support by clicking the subscribe and also to click the “bell”, so that it can notify for future new videos.

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Illustration Gouache

This is something that I have not try before, painting illustration using Gouache. This is really a relax and calming painting as I am letting go of any perfection. I am using loose shapes to represent my subjects .The colours I am applying here are just a layer without making further enhancement. The windows are mostly ” crooked” and I am using black to represent them.

The Gouache paint I am using is the brand Miya Himi . This should be a student grade gouache but the selection of colour choices are quite wide ( 18 colours ). I hope you enjoy the video which I created on youtube. My name is yen and if you like my videos, support me by subscribe to my channel , like, share and comment. Really appreciated 🙂

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Colour Elsa and monster doodles

This was one of the challenging painting of Elsa using colour pencils so far. It was not easy for me especially I am not good in creating realism arts. The process was nerve wrecking and I did not know how to mix colours using colour pencils. This set of Faber Castell polychromo set colour pencils were bought more than 1 decade ago and I decided to revisit this medium again.

I could not remember why I bought this extremely expensive colour pencil sets in the first place. After drafting with light graphite lines , I decided to go straight into colour pencils.

I started trying out the hair colours using white and warm grey. Somehow, the colours seems strange initially. After some corrections, I decided not to overthink and went for whatever the closet to the original. Next Layering the skin colours was a much better process as I have some shades of skin colours to play with.

Lastly , it was time to doodle with little monsters using another medium, Copic markers. The ideas were to see how I can blend a character with fun doodling to create the chemistry on them.Result was not so bad. At the same time, my younger son also wanted to join in the fun and insist to draw Olaf , the snow man. It was such a perfect collaboration with my child.

Watch me paint this in youtube as below and hope you guys enjoy my arts.

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Making Youtube shorts on painting burger

This was a fun painting challenge that was set up by one of my youtube artist friend , astrid. I have not done any food painting before and decided to give it a try. This month challenge was food painting. The idea is to create arts or crafts related to food. I have no idea of what I going to paint , but feels that it can never goes wrong in just sketch and paint a burger. As this was a shorts video, I intended to keep it simple and within 60 secs time frame.Nothing fancy about shooting and editing portion. Watch this 60 sec short video in my youtube channel.

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A Happy 2021 To Everyone !!

Today, I am doing a simple doodling for the starting of 2021. I am using a very old set of Copic Markers for this doodling. Though 2020 is a challenging year for everyone , but I hope 2021 will be year full of hope. So I have throw in blazing , vibrant colours in this doodling art to represent this. Cheers !

Click the link below to watch my doodling and colouring process.

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HOW I DOODLE CHILDREN BOOK “THE GRUFFALO”

This week I am making a special doodle to celebrate over 100 subscribers on youtube on Christmas day . It was a long journey to reach this milestone and yeah… just a small celebration:)

This inspiration came to me as I would like to doodle something that is really fun and cute. This is a classic story that was read again and again to my 4 yrs old. Lots of planning on what type of doodle characters to include. I would like to make some contrast on this doodle. If you may have already know, The Gruffalo is in fact a fierce monster ( in the story ) that all animals are afraid of. I also wanted to add cute doodles to have some sort of balance on my characters. I started off with pencil drafting which I normally do. I thought it was easy at first … more work along the way as I understand later that I will need to add so much characters that I was exhausted in mind, in researching as well as trying to challenge myself to finish within 2 days. I was totally stressed up.

It took me 1 and 1/3 days to finish up the drafting alone. I planned it in such a way that I also added some characters from Julia Donaldson’s other story books. Time for laying the ink onto my doodles.

I am using 0.8 mm Sakura Micron for the outline as I wanted to create some depth onto the doodles . Making some spontaneous thicker lines on some areas to make it more fun.

For the details of the doodles, as they are quite small , it will be better to use 0.05 pen, otherwise, the lines may collides with each other and smudged the images.

Catch me doodled this on my youtube channel as below. Support my art channel by Like / share/comments and hit the subscribe buttons for future videos. Thank you .

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How to doodle in your way

How to doodle in your way is always a challenging question for most people and I have seen tons of artists doing it and making a wave over youtube. I have done this doodle and may consider one of my favourite doodles so far. It is complicated but it is doable if you breaking down each into smaller doodles.

Just sharing my process on making this doodling.

1) Get a theme for your doodling

First, you need to have in mind the theme for your doodles. That is very important as this is the skeleton of your doodle story.

2) Drafting process

This is the 2nd step where you need to draft the doodle skeleton. I am using pencil to draft out the positioning and composition of the doodles. This is one of the important step as you do not want any mistakes that may affect the outcome of the doodle. If you find anything that need correction, just use an eraser at this stage

3) Differentiate the main characters as well as small elements

What I mean is you need to lay down the different position of your main characters and in between add in some spices like small elements( circle, wave, triangle, ribbon etc ). For my doodling here, mostly I am using the “droplet” shape as elements to create the flow.I am using some shapes like bubbles as well. You can use any type, go to pinterest to look for some inspirations.

4) Inking

This is the step whereby you should have already finished all your drafting . This involve using different variations of lines to make your doodles “alive”. Volume up the lines to make it more interesting. When you are doing some detail works, it is better to use the fine tip pen. I am using 0.05 , 0.50 and 0.80 felt tip black colour pen here. Make sure the pen you use are waterproof. Often, pigmented pens are waterproof, in case you want to use watercolour for your doodles.

Below is the final result of my inking process. I get the inspiration doodling ideas from youtubers like Robbie Art, Vexx and Gawx Art. They are really or in fact professional doodlers.

For my case, I did not use any cute or monster faces on this doodle, but using photos from places in Singapore and then randomly add in some elements in.

5) Colouring

This is the most fun part in finishing the doodle arts. Just add in colours that you like. Some people recommend to use the colour wheel as guideline, that is to use the colour opposite of on the wheel to get a harmonious colour effect. As my arts are mostly watercolour painting, I am using watercolour to try this doodling.

If it is too overwhelming, colour the doodles in small portion at a time. Colour it carefully and neatly to make the doodles standout. Another tip is to layer the colours starting from light to darker tone to make it look more 3D . Stop if you are tired and then continue again.

This is the final painting of my doodles. And it took me 5 hours to completion. It is so satisfying ! Catch me doodle this on youtube and if you like my art videos, support me by subscribe to to momwhosketch channel and hit the bell for future notification of new videos.Thank you

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