Art & Inspiration letters from NIGHTEͶ (Nathan Guilhot)
This is not just a newsletter — it's my personal magazine documenting my creative journey.
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Good morning Reader! :)
I’m happy to have you again this week! I’m super excited to tell you about my progress today: we’ll go over how I will reuse the work I did during Inktober!
I also want to show you a glimpse of things I did years ago, and what I learned from them! You’ll see, it’s very different from my current work.
Let’s dive in!
A pocket guide to the Blue Roof City
Last week we celebrated the final day of the Inktober challenge, with 31 unique illustrations of different places in my universe!
Now that it’s all done and good, I’m now working on the second life of this challenge, so that the project can live on beyond October. And to do this, I’m making it a zine!
This week I was focused on setting up everything to be ready for print: scanning all the illustrations, deciding on the layout, size, font…
Earlier this year I published a children’s book called “Susie & The Blue Roof Witch” set in the same universe, so thankfully I didn’t have to learn everything from scratch once again.
Copy-pasting all the text and images was very tedious, but at the end I was stunned to realize that, with 31 images, the table of contents, intro and outro, the zine is now 70+ pages long!
Absolutely massive, twice as much as the book I spent seven months working on! Granted, the quality of the illustration was not the same haha, but this made me even more excited to see this little book come into the physical world! :)
That's how the editing looks like in the software I'm using! Cover is still a WIP
But I’m also strongly confident that I will NOT be printing and binding all of it myself. Even printing a few copies would be a massive undertaking in time and ink for my home printer (and those are expensive and prone to fail).
I will be asking my local print shop for a quote; hopefully I can find the right balance between quality and affordability!
In the meantime, since I finally finished the layout, I decided to print a few pages for reference. Here are the results :)
You probably noticed, but it’s very small!
Because the drawings themselves were done in a tiny format, I thought it would be fitting to display them in a pocket size rather than stretching them out. And I think this looks very cute on top of that!
When I was working on my book, picking the right font size was a real struggle; it looks so different on real paper compared to the screen! So that’s part of why I wanted to print it early, especially for such a small size.
What do you think? Is it big enough to be readable for most people?
Now I’ll be contacting my printer this week, and I’ll let you know how it’s going next week :)
An illustration is never finished
Quick detour before we continue to the main subject: I finished my illustration... again!
Last week I showed you my latest illustration as finished, but of course there are always things I could improve. So I quickly went and polished it further, so let me show it to you again!
You might not see obvious differences since last week, but at least now I can sleep better!
While we are on the subject, I also want to announce that I added the illustration to my online gallery and made a coloring page version for you to download freely! :)
We now have 10 pages available for download for anyone who is subscribed to my newsletter. I’m super happy about it!
Obviously I have made way more illustrations than this, so if there is one you’d like to print and color at home and don’t see yet in the list, feel free to reach out!
Those explorations that don’t lead to anything
You know, often we like to see life as a continuous line of cause and event, of natural progression — but reality is much messier sometimes.
This week I stumbled upon some old art experiments I did in the past, and that have almost nothing to do with what I’m doing now.
Back in 2020 (what a year this one was!), I started doing art with a software called Playscii. It looks like a pixel art program, but instead of drawing individual pixels, you draw using tiles or monospace characters.
I'm very sad that the Mac version doesn't seem to work anymore!
It’s very similar to ASCII art, to give you an idea, but with way more characters. It’s very niche, to say the least. PETSCII art originates from the Commodore 64, to give you an idea!
So here I was, discovering this program and the incredible work of Raquel Meyers, and I started to create art with it. I lost most of them over the years, but here are two that I found again in my archive!
Very different from what I’m doing now, isn’t it?
Even crazier, I performed live on stage in front of a small crowd at a festival organized by my friends: I was drawing abstract shapes and futuristic landscapes while my friend was improvising electronic music. That was a vibe! I so wish I had some pictures to show you!
Yes the CRT blur is very much intentional!
But there is a reason why I’m telling you about this!
Over the years I’ve tried many, many different ways to make art, or just create in general. I’ve tried a ton of software and styles, delved into 3D modeling, did some reverse engineering, made more than 20 games that I posted online (and a ton more that stayed unfinished on my hard drive). I even made homebrews for the NES and mods for Paper Mario!
Turns out I was both obsessed by Paper Mario and Splatoon at the time
Some directly influenced the way I do art now: my first landscapes were made because I needed backgrounds for my visual novels, for example.
But most didn’t lead into anything at all.
Some might say that they were a waste of time: you really cannot say that drawing abstract patterns with obscure character sets, or adding a Splatoon character to a Mario game, did anything for my art or career.
And yet, I don’t regret those explorations at all.
They didn’t build into anything concrete, and I’m far removed from them now.
But those explorations still contributed to who I am in some way. They build character and make life more interesting. And above all, they made me happy, and at least I don’t have any regrets or unsatisfied curiosity.
What about you? Do you also crave trying something unusual, even though you know that in the long term it will not lead to something great or efficient?
My goal today was to show that you shouldn’t feel guilty if your hobby is not part of a greater plan.
It’s okay to take detours and stumble.
The real crime in life is to do nothing.
And this concludes the newsletter for this week! Thank you so much for following along. I'm excited to come back next week with more art to share!
In the meantime, have a great week, a great holiday if you have one, and as always,
Take care, - Nighten
This email is part of my art Newsletter. Invite a friend to join the club: https://club.nighten.fr
