Welcome to February! ✨🤗 Theme of the month: Whimsical Landscapes (Patreon)

Hi everyone!! 😊

Last month, we focused on Simplifying Nature Illustrations, and because we had so much fun exploring this theme (and I absolutely loved seeing all of your beautiful illustrations!) I wanted to continue working with landscapes this month.

Since it’s February, the month of love and romantic vibes, I thought: why not take our illustrations into a more dreamy and whimsical direction?

So the theme for this month will be: Whimsical Landscapes 🌸✨

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

In this post, you can read about:

What you can expect in February here on Patreon

An overview of all the January content I shared

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

✨ What you can expect in February

A little overview of the content I will share with you in February. With the content calendar, you will have an idea when to expect which reward! All content will be based on Whimsical Landscapes!

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 whimsical landscapes. Think of cute little cottages, lots of colourful flowers, and dreamy hills, like the ones below! I think we will have lots of fun with the upcoming references! 😊

✨ January overview

The theme of January was simplifying nature elements and landscapes! I shared lots of content last month. We had 4 weeks of reference images and step-by-step illustration posts, and of course:

An exercise about simplifying nature elements

A printable worksheet where you can learn to draw an African Tree

3 video tutorials:

Sea View Cottage

Lake House

Simple way to draw a tree

A blog post about Simplifying Details - Using Texture and Suggestion in Illustration

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

January 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. January was a month of heavy winter weather, big decisions and getting more balance in my life again. You can read all about it down below.

Illustration work updates

Making the decision to go full-time!!! 😱🤩

As I mentioned in the welcome to January post, I have been thinking of quitting my job as a nurse for a while this year. I strongly feel that being able to fully focus on my illustration work will help me to go through with my dream to be a fulltime illustrator! And I promised to keep you all updated, so here are my plans for the upcoming months:

In the last week of February I will move to Portugal for 5 weeks to work in the Algarve in a Coliving & Coworking space, which I'm looking forward to so much!

From the beginning of April until the end of June I am going to take some time off from my work as a nurse with the guarantee that I can come back after that! So that will take the edge of having to make it in the 4 months I'm going fulltime!

I'm sooo happy I finally made the decision to take these steps! I think it will be such a big boost for my illustrator career! Of course I will update you all every month how it's going! ☺️

Having fun with landscapes again

I'm very happy we did a landscape theme last month! 🤗 I enjoyed it so much, because it had been some time since I was focusing on drawing landscapes. I definitely enjoyed all the colors we used and the way we focused on simplifying the landscapes. I learned so much about how to approach the references:

Focusing on shapes instead of details helped me a lot!

Shading is everything! It helps to make the illustrations feel more alive

Sometimes de background only needs a few pencil strokes, less is more!

Personal updates

Here are some photos from December 🤗

Inspired to play the piano again

My mom asked my if I wanted to go to the concert of Andrea Vanzo, it's a very famous composer and he gave a concert in Groningen! I loved it so much, the music was so beautiful and it gave me new inspiration to start playing on my piano again! Currently I'm trying to learn the song: Valzer D'Inverno! A very difficult but beautiful one to learn.

Enjoying the extreme winter weather

This month has been crazy in the Netherlands, with lots of snow and cold weather! We are definitely not build for this kind of weather here and everyone had to adjust to it so much. But I personally loved it! Lots of snow walks, going sledding with friends, making a cute little snowman 😊

Getting some balance in my life again

After all the festivities in December, I felt like I was so tired all through January. As some of you may know I have adhd (mainly inattentive adhd) and sometimes I just get so tired and overwhelmed of all things that are happening all at once (Even if it's only good things! 😉). So I had to get myself to rest a bit more again. I did a lot of yoga, started to meditate again and went on lots of little walks, I also did a lot of naps, which helped a lot! And being creative is almost always a good idea to get that balance back again! 😊

This was the little monthly update! Thank you so much if you've managed to read all the way through, and I wish you a wonderful new month full of creativity and inspiration! 🤗✨

Celyn 🌸