How She Creates: Ep 006 - Watercolour with Nina Christensen and Yao Cheng
This episode is the most requested one we had, and we're so excited to bring it to you. Today we are talking about watercolours. We're with two of our absolute favourite watercolour artists, and the ones who made us fall in love with the medium - Nina Christensen and Yao Cheng. We're pretty excited about getting to talk to them. In the episode we discuss their creative stories, where they find inspiration, their best tips for practising, material recommendations, and how awesome they are.
Episode Takeaways and Artist Actions
- Yao and Nina's creative stories
- product recommendations and the difference between cheap and professional watercolours
- the difference between wet and dry watercolours
- Artist action: paint on the front and back of expensive watercolour paper
- Artist action: save your little practise strips
- doing watercolour classes, and being continuous learners
- tips for practising
- how Nina and Yao developed their talent
- finding inspiration and coming up with ideas
- sketching first vs. winging it
- Artist action: don't put pressure on your art!
- training yourself to be a better and more confident artist
- Tips for noobs:
- go ahead and paint something
- use a palette
- focus on the experience and the process
- you learn a lot by painting circles
- what the artists paint while practising
- practical ideas for what to paint when you're learning
- inspiration
Resources and Tools
Please note that some of these are affiliate links. As always, we'd never recommend anything we (or the artists) don't truly love.
- Just Add Watercolor
- Beginning Watercolor
- Intermediate Watercolor
- Resist Painting Techniques with Watercolor
- Watercolor FAQs with Yao Cheng
- Creative Start podcast
- Design Matters podcast by Debbie Millman
- the artists in the Get Messy community
- Satsuki Shibuya
- Ruth Chou Simons
Guests
Nina Christensen
Nina Berg Christensen is a 30-year old graphic designer and maker of things working from home in a small town in chilly Denmark. She’s made two kids and is currently creating tons of papery and painty things. She’s into art journaling, watercolors, board games and everyday glam.
Yao Cheng-Moseley
Yao is a watercolor artist and designer based in Columbus, Ohio. She is best known for her simple, bright and expressive painting style that can be seen on home-decor products, wedding stationeries and clientele work. She also shares her love for this medium in her series of online watercolor tutorials on Creativebug.com 
