Book Beauty Monday : Paris in Color

Such a beautiful coffee table book for daydreaming on gloomy day like today. I'm not particularly in love with Paris but I love overall atmosphere of european classic. Old buildings, cobbled pavements, little cute shop signs, ornamental frames of windows and doors and sweet romantic color combinations.

This book is all about colors. The author/photographer divided each section by different colors. Starting from black, blue, brown, green and so on. It's full of pictures of little things, of everyday life. Simple but beautiful.

Visit this photographer's blog here and you may be interested in her other book, The Paris Journal.

Book Beauty Monday : I am a Bunny by Richard Scarry

Books are my main source of inspirations, especially those with beautiful covers and lovely illustrations. I have been updating (on and off) on this blog and my other facebook page about beautiful books I collect since I discovered the joy of looking at beautiful book blogs like Books-by-its-cover and Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Now that I decided to make this blog a better recorder of my creative life, I'm going to include my book collection here too. Besides, it 's much easier to search old posts here on blog than in facebook :)

And this is my latest update, I am a Bunny by Richard Scarry. It seems that Scarry's works are childhood favorite for a lot of people but I have to confess that I have just learned of his name a few years ago when there were suddenly many books of his works republished and for sale in my local bookshop. Love his sweet character, how he used colors and play with composition. Beautiful, beautiful book :)

Book Beauty Monday : Water Paper Paint

I took watercolor class once in high school and once in college. I tried other kinds of paints like acrylic and gouache too and I think watercolor painting is the most difficult for me. The paint seems too hard to control and fix when I ruin something. Still, I love looking at watercolor paintings. They usually give out the feeling of sweet, lively happiness.

I found this book accidentally and was immediately drawn to beautiful cover and inside layout. There are so many watercolor painting books in the market but most of them look like textbooks with busy layout design and I feel heavy looking at them. 

This Water Paper Paint looks different. The book has such light and airy layout design with beautiful colored photos laid out carefully and cleverly throughout the book. The content is readable and practical too. The writer gradually walks you through each step from basic knowledge of the paint, its equipment, how to take care of them and all the different techniques. The main fun is all the projects the writer explains in step-by-step which seem so easy to follow along.

Although I'm more a digital painter, the book is so beautiful and inviting that I want to try some lessons in the book :) This will be a valuable reference and good for inspiration for years to come too!

I have taken some shots of the lovely pages here. Enjoy!

Book Beauty Monday : Painted Pages

I found this book while I was browsing some other books on art shelf in my local bookstore. I'm not really a mixed-media person. I just hate cleaning up art equipments after painting or drawing, to be honest. But I do love watching other artists working in this art field. Their patience in doing layers step by step always amazes me.

This book grabbed me instantly with the first spread layouts. My job mostly focuses on book design so it's kind of my habit to look at cover and text layout of each book first. Sometimes if I open a book and find something in design terms that I don't like (lousy use of fonts, bad layout design etc.) I generally put it down. This book has it all that I love, airy layout, easy to read text, gorgeous colorful photos, I especially love its chapter pages with full spreads of closed-up photos. The overall color palette just grabbed me too. The art director of this book really did a good job to present Sarah's unique character. If you go look at her website and blog, you will see how this book is really a connection.

I hadn't heard of Sarah Ahearn Bellemare before but after looking through this book, I fell in love with her work. I have seen several of mixed-media art pieces but I think I love her work best. Her paintings give out the feeling of happiness and remind me of childhood with sweet, bright and colorful world.

The book has a lot of interesting sections: Sarah's own art experiences, her creative journey, step by step working process, some mixed-media techniques (which although I don't do this art, I enjoy reading it anyway) inserted with inspiring short notes and I love the guest artists interviews!

I think you can tell how much I love this book, find it if you haven't had a copy yet :)

Book Beauty Monday : 365 Things to Draw and Paint

Don't you love it when you have something that reminds you of your childhood? This book is one of them. I feel happy every time I take it out from shelf and just browse through it.

There seems to be a lot of activity books out there in the book market these days. This book is one of the very first big edition of activity books Usborne has published (or at least that's what I believe). I specially love this book because I never had this kind of big book before. All the pages are beautiful and have elements that make you think and play (and I'm already a grown-up!). Love color combinations, concepts in each spread and beautiful drawings. This is one of my happy books! :D

PS.  I'm doing a new schedule for this section, Book Beauty Monday. I intended to post beautiful book every Monday at first but now I feel I need more space to talk about my illustration works, my shop improvement, my work life in general. I have found that blogging about my work process helps me focus on my goal more. So, I'm going to post about lovely book every two weeks instead from now on.

Thanks for coming I hope you have a merry day!