Welcome to January ✨🤗 Theme of the month: Simplifying Nature Illustrations (Patreon)

Hi everyone!! 😊

Welcome to January! I wish you all a happy new year, with lots of amazing new opportunities and memories! I hope you all had an amazing Christmas and New Year celebration! ✨🥰

Starting a new year is always a great time to start building some new habits, like making time to learn to draw! So we will start off strong with this new month, with the theme: Simplifying Nature Illustrations

Here you can find all the content I will post this month

We will start in week 2, as I gave myself some free time between Christmas and New Year. ✨

In this post, you can read about:

What you can expect in January here on Patreon

An overview of all the December content I shared

How am I doing?: Personal updates and Illustration work updates

✨ What you can expect in January

A little overview of the content I will share with you in January. With the content calendar, you will have an idea when to expect which reward! All content will be based on simplifying nature landscapes and elements!

It depends on your tier, which reward you will get access to, so here is an overview of every tier! (With ofcourse access to polls and our community chat for all tiers!)

Theme of the month

For this month, I want to focus on simplifying our illustrations. I will share lots of step-by-step tutorials, video tutorials, exercises, and a blog post on nature elements and landscapes! A subject where you can let yourself draw more freely! 😊

Extra video tutorials

Starting in December, we have 3 video tutorials every month, instead of two! 🤗

The additional tutorial is included in:

The Creative Practice Boost tier

The Creative Practice Boost Plus tier

✨ December overview

The theme of December was, of course, Christmas!! I shared lots of content last month. We had 4 weeks of reference images and step-by-step illustration posts, and:

An exercise with sketchbook prompts

A printable worksheet where you can learn to draw a Candy Cane

A video tutorial: How to draw a Christmas Lollipop

A video tutorial: How to draw a Christmas Wreath

A video tutorial: How to draw a Snowy Cottage

A blog post about how to create your own Christmas Card (With video tutorial)

You can find all December rewards here: Complete December content collection

December Collection

✨ How am I doing?

To give you a little insight into my work as an illustrator, I will share an update each month on what I've been up to in the previous month. December was a month of many social activities, so my illustration work was a bit in the background. You can read all about it down below.

Illustration work updates

A new commission

For the first time in a long time, I got a commission to create a new home card! They wanted it in my Celyn Design style, and I loved to work in my old style again! Here are some examples of previous cards I created in the last couple of years!

Thinking of going full-time 😱

I haven't made any definite decisions yet, but I'm thinking of quitting my job as a nurse for a while in 2026. I strongly feel I want to make it work as an illustrator this year, and one thing that would help me a lot is to only focus on my business for a while!

I already planned to go to Portugal in March to work full-time for my business while enjoying the Algarve (which I will share more about soon!), so I'm thinking of quitting my job for a while after that! Very scary but also very exciting to think about these plans!

I will keep you all updated! ☺️

Personal updates

Here are some photos from December 🤗

I went to many Christmas Markets

I don't know if anyone knows the Dickens stories, but they are quite famous here in the Netherlands! It was in Deventer, one of the cutest cities in the Netherlands, and it was so much fun! We really stepped into the world of Dickens. I also went to Winterwelvaart in Groningen with an Art route, which I loved of course!!

Unlocked a new hobby

I have two friends who, just like me, love all creative hobbies! So we decided to work with clay for the first time! So happy with our results, we definitely need more time to practice, but I already experienced that it is such a mindful activity! 😊

This was the little monthly update! Thank you so much if you've managed to read all the way through, and I wish you all the best for the New Year! 🤗✨

Celyn 🌸