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Kuala Lumpur, where she lives. “It’s old and has lots of places to sketch.” Ipoh, a smaller city midway between Penang and Kuala Lumpur, and Melaka in the south are also among her favorites. They all offer complex and fascinating collections of architecture and people.
I met with Yap Yeen Yee, (her friends call her YY) over Zoom in late February. She is a self-taught artist, urban sketcher, and the Interior Design Director at Luna Solutions in Kuala Lumpur, a design firm owned by her and her husband, Teoh Kim Seah. It was their marble supplier that first asked them if they’d heard of Urban Sketchers. “After 20 years of being designers, we found urban sketching.”
Looking at @yyyap on Instagram you might not realize that her sketches are actually quite large. She also uses wide painter’s brushes to swatch the area with color before laying in her ink drawings. Using an energetic line, she’s able to finish a sketch in a very short time. She can actually finish several sketches in what might take someone else the whole time allotted for a meet-up session. “When you go outside the feeling is different. You feel very excited. It’s fun.“
sketcher spotlight
he bustling vendors, markets packed to the gills with mundane and mysterious, outdoor cafes, and jam-packed buildings. Yap Yeen Yee’s broad strokes of color, her tangled lines, and the energetic composition characterize her surroundings: the crowded, but lovely, streets, markets, and cafes of Malaysia and beyond.
“I hadn’t done any sketching in 20 years. We were always working.” Being a designer, she knew she had the background for sketching. They met up with the local urban sketchers and soon she and her husband were on a sketching spree. They were caught up in the excitement of the new activity. “We joined every sketch event we could find.” Their meal breaks became sketch breaks. They would sketch at breakfast, lunch, and dinner – anytime they could. YY created a What’s App group for anyone who wanted to sketch. Even now a few years later, you can find both of them sketching somewhere on the streets of any of the highly sketchable places in Malaysia. I asked YY for recommendations on where to go to sketch in Malaysia. She said without hesitation, “First stop, Penang. Because Penang has culture – Chinese temples, old buildings. It also has great food.” She also recommend34 drawing attention
This past year she has done more testing of her tools and materials, trying out different materials, papers, brush angles. She never uses pencil to make her initial drawing. “My vision of the overall picture is very clear in my mind when I start.” As she speaks, she waves her arms outlining the imaginary picture. “When I look at the scene, I can sketch without doing a drawing.” YY is really grateful to Urban Sketchers. “It’s given me a second life.” She used to think about what she would do after retirement - what hobbies and interests she might take up. She never thought about sketching. Now she wants to travel the world and sketch, meeting with urban sketchers all over the world. And because her husband has the same interest, they can both travel, sketch, shop, sketch, eat, sketch, travel… using that broad brush to see the world one sketch at a time.