Book Review: Cozy Days: The Art of Iraville

Ira Sluyterman van Langeweyde, aka Iraville, is an illustrator from Germany known for her charming watercolour art that she shares regularly online. She has a huge following on social media, with more than 220K subscribers on her Youtube channel and close to one million followers on her Instagram page. So it's not surprising to see her getting a book deal from 3dtotal Publishing.

This is a wonderful hardcover artbook for fans of her art. It includes her beautiful artworks, yes, but even more as she shares her watercolour techniques in detail from idea to the finished piece, goes through how you can make your own paint from pigment powder, and making an affordable DIY watercolour paper stretcher.

Other than the techniques she talks about, there's also a lot to read on her career and inspiration. There are stories of her work on web illustrations, her passion for watercolour and on developing a style.

Her style of watercolour is very design oriented and precise. There's strong sense of design elements, such as using visible shapes and play on negative shapes. She likes to use a warm colour palette and paint with layers, lots of layers. The illustrations are sometimes accompanied by drawing tips, and commentary on her favourite subjects to draw.

Her approach to design is really inspiring. Really inspires me to think about about using negative shapes and just have fun.

This is a gorgeous, insightful and inspiring artbook, 152-pages in total. Fantastic addition to the 3dtotal illustrator series of artbooks.

Highly recommended.

Cozy Days: The Art of Iraville (3dtotal Illustrator Series) is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | AU | JP | CN)

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