Art & Inspiration letters from NIGHTEͶ (Nathan Guilhot)
My personal magazine documenting my creative journey :)
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Hey there everybody!
Thank you so much for being back with me today for this new edition of my art newsletter :)
I hope you're doing great this week. Me right now I'm mostly focusing on the last preparations for the wedding, which is pretty intense but I'm very excited to see the date approaching! (finally! It's at the end of the month :D )
Today we will talk about some of the progress updates I did on a project you guys really loved when I released it, as well as a little story about the eclipse and the particular place where I saw it last week.
Let's begin!
Celebrating the Eclipse 🌙
If you’re living in Europe, I assume you heard about the eclipse that was taking place last Wednesday!
It was technically only a total eclipse in a small portion of Spain, But the south of France still had a very great view of the event. And I happen to be there with my family! :)
And to see it we went to a very special place that you might not know about if you’re not from that region: the Pic de Nore!
We were not the only ones there!
You see, north of the region I’m coming from, the area of Carcassonne, there is what is called the Black Mountain (literally), which is a pretty large mountain range, but not big enough to be notable even on a national level. I don’t think I ever saw it mentioned on any map or textbook.
And at the top of the mountain is something that is visible from almost everywhere, and that I noticed since I was a kid which is, you guessed it, this “Pic de Nore”.
It looks very cool and futuristic; It even reminds me of the rocket that used Tintin to go to the moon.
But it’s actually not very significant either, from what I know it’s mostly used for FM radio nowadays. Still a pretty great place to visit, because you have a beautiful view on the whole region!
And that’s exactly why we decided to go there for the solar eclipse :)
But if you’ve been following my stuff for a while, you might notice that this building is kinda familiar.
And you would be right because it’s something that inspired me a lot to the point where in my illustration I often sneak a reference to it whenever I need to draw a mountain.
Here it is! Practically the same as in real life 😄
If you remember my Inktober project, amongst all the locations from my city, where every one of my illustrations take place, I also did a observatory! It sits on top of the mountain, overseeing the entire city :)
The first few times I drew it I actually didn’t realize what was the inspiration, but if you compare the two, it really couldn’t be more clear that I was inspired by this building that I was seeing far away since I was a child.
The eclipse itself was very stunning. It was my first time seeing an real eclipse in my life actually! Seeing the sun slooowly getting eaten by the moon was very impressive. And since the event was in the evening, after the peak of the eclipse we had I think one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen :)
As true French people, we brought with us a picnic and we stayed a few more hours after the event to just enjoy the night sky, clear from any city light.
It just happened that on the same night there was a shooting stars falling, and it would have been very dumb to go back home right away and miss it!
I sadly didn’t do any art from this event, but my fiancee did, and they really captured the mood that was there very well. I truly love what they made!
This section was partially an excuse to share their work, but also because I don’t think I ever had the chance to explain the origin story of the observatory that is in so many of my illustrations.
And of course I took some reference pictures! Maybe I will draw the actual building in full detail someday.
Sortie finally got an update!
I have a lot of pictures saved, multiple thousands by now. And between this and my archives, I always had a lot of trouble finding the exact image I was thinking about. And I assume you do too!
That's why a few months ago I started working on an app called Sortie, which is a local gallery manager and Pinterest alternative.
Without sending anything to the cloud, it allows you to have a browsable feed with your images, and be able to filter and, more importantly, search for them in natural language. So if I search "cats", I will have pictures of cats. Magic!
Here I can just type "Aquarium" and get only relevant results!
And you guys seemed to really enjoy using the app! But I had to put aside the development to focus on finding a new job and transitioning into this new role… and now dust have settled a bit, I felt the need to come back to it and address some of the feedback you sent me :)
Here are some of the new features in the latest version:
Filter image by source!
Often I have no idea where a particular image is coming from. Where did I get this thing?
Turns out, depending on your OS, your files might already carry a lot of metadata about where exactly you downloaded them.
So now Sortie is using this to help you find your image!
It classifies them and allows you to filter by url. So now you can combine with existing filters to query like “All the red images I downloaded from Tumblr”, or “All the meme I saved from Discord in 2023”. Neat! I hope to continue to improve the search to allow you to find your image more easily :) But this is a nice step forward.
Image editing!Yes, finally!
It happens to me all the time that I take a picture with my phone and the orientation is wrong. Or I take a selfie and the image is mirrored in a weird way. Or I saved something from Reddit and I have a big watermark at the bottom.
So now we have a lightweight image editing feature that allows you to crop, rotate, and flip an image directly inside Sortie.
It’s very basic, but that’s kinda on purpose; I hope you still will have a good use out of it. It helped me a lot to clean up my own gallery :)
Export a board!
Just like in Pinterest, in Sortie you can curate your gallery into boards around a certain theme, but once you’re done doing that, you can just… stare at it. There was not a lot of things you could do with your beautiful collection. Until now!
One of you requested it, and now you can export a board as a zip file with all the images inside it that you can easily send to someone, archive or import somewhere else :) It even keeps the file order!
I’m not sure what you guys like to use, but if there is another kind of export you would be interested in, please let me know.
And finally, you can drag your images out of the app! 🙂↕️
In my opinion, Sortie is very good at helping you find your images, but to get it out of the app is kind of a pain. You used to have to open the Explorer or Finder and get your image from there.
But now you can drag out the image to any app you use directly from Sortie!
This was another feature that was requested and on the back burner for a while, so I’m happy to have gone to it finally. This might seem small, but it truly makes a difference when you are using, for example, a messaging app or you want to quickly copy an image somewhere else.
I hope all of it will be useful to you guys! Please don’t hesitate to give Sortie a try and let me know if there is anything I could improve!
Cool art of the week!
Here are some cool art and artists that I discovered and liked this week :)
I learned about the beautiful art of Parker Parrella (@parkerparrella), and on top of beautiful motif they also have an incredible color palette ☺️
Alright, that's all for me this week. Thank you so much for reading! After next Tuesday I will probably have a short break in order to focus on my wedding, but I'm excited to get back to you as soon as possible. I just want to warn in advance just in case 😄 I'll try to make next week's newsletter extra special, finger crossed!
In the meantime please have a great rest of your day, and as always
Take care, - Nighten
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