Art & Inspiration letters from NIGHTEͶ (Nathan Guilhot)
My personal magazine documenting my creative journey :)
SHARE
Hey there everyone!
Yes, as you can see this newsletter is a bit late; I wanted to have it ready on Tuesday morning as usual, but I didn't had the time nor the energy to finish it on time :)
Oh well, it happens!
And for good reason here because I just came back from a big convention. And I'm super excited to tell you about it today, including the very special thing I did for the occasion ;)
In this newsletter I'm gonna tell you all about the preparation of this big event, probably the most intense I've ever experienced 😄 Let's get started!
How I made a 5m long zine (yes)
Alright, yes you have read the title correctly. This is actually something I did for the festival.
But before I dive into it, I want to briefly give you some useful context:
Exactly one year ago my project for Inktober 2025 was to draw a new location and description from my fictional city, where most of my illustrations are taking place. Against all odds I actually kept it up for the 31 days, and you can read it all here!
Now back then I really wanted to make a printed zine/small book out of it, but once I prepared everything I was quickly discouraged by the reality of printing a book:
31 illustrations, 31 descriptions, plus forewords/afterword and extra content, this little book would have been 70+ pages long. And it’s very expensive to print and bind something this lengthy, even in a small format and especially in low volume.
Damn it, I overdid it again!
Not sure what to do with it, I left the project on hold until I can find a solution. Flashforward a year, and I’m preparing for Łódż’s 37th International Comics and Games Festival, and I realised that a comic festival might finally be push I need to bring this little book to the real world.
And that’s were I got the idea: What if I didn’t had to bind this zine at all? What if I just glued all the pages together into a gigantic accordion?
How bad would it be?
It would just requires a lot of cutting and glue, but it seemed doable. But wait, let’s run some quick math here:
I’m printing this in a very small format, pages at 7 cm wide each
We have ~70+ pages, so to print them I’ll need to split everything on 19 A4 pages glued together…
Which gives us a zine that is >500cm long! 5 meters!!
This was too tempting, I just had to see it in practice!
I prepared the files and printed everything at home, praying for the ink to not run out, and I got to work.
First realisation: It’s a truck load of work to cut and glue all of this; you have to be both precise and fast enough to not let it take forever.
Second: Yeah, it actually kinda works.
As I put more and more pages together, it started to look more and more like a real thing! Well, at the end it was clearly a bit wonky, but this test print was very encouraging.
Now I needed to make the real thing!
I briefly considered printing the final version in a local print shop, but once again the cost caught on to me: each copies would have cost me around 10€, that’s before cutting, glueing, and making any profit!
Well, printing at home didn’t seem that bad after all, if my printer can survive long enough. I printed 2 copies, 38 pages, and thankfully it went ok!
Safe to say that I did hundreds of cuts between all of them, up until late on Thursday to have everything ready on time.
By itself it’s not very different from our previous convention, but the issue is that I used it so much that the paper trimmer’s blade started to get blunt and ripping the paper to shred! :o
I had to quickly find a solution before we needed to jump on the train to the city where the festival was held.
Scissors would only take me so far (and would probably injure my hand c’: ), so on the very last day I bought a new paper trimmer, and barely had enough time to cut the strip before we had to head to the train. Expensive, but worth it; that was a close one!
Time to travel to the festival!
As I implied, this convention was super different from my previous one because not only it was only me and my partner sharing the table, but it was also in a completely different city!
We had to carry all our stock and material in super heavy suitcases and stay more than 3 hours in the train before finally reaching our hotel.
Me trying to rest despite the train's light
I honestly had no idea if it would work out at all: would we make enough sales on our own to cover not only the table, transport, food and accommodations?
But even if money ended up wasted (it happens you know) I was still super excited to see how it will unfold :)
On Saturday morning we arrived at the Arena where the event was held, went around once or twice to find the entrance and finally our table, and started setting up everything!
When you have a table at an event like this you often have no idea how it will go exactly; will there be enough light around? A wall where you can hang things? Are you gonna be in a crowded zone or a deserted one? Hard to see even on the map, it often feels like a gamble.
One table near us was tucked in a weird place of the structure where they had a very low ceiling; behind their table they couldn’t stand up at all!
But thankfully we were pretty lucky overall: we had a somewhat usable wall, enough space in front of us for people to stop by, and we were even able to hand some christmas lights and cloth above us :)
This really made our table stands out in my opinion!
Our only big downside was that one of our table was super wobbly, and they had mismatched height :’) With a big structure on top it would have been super risky, but thankfully we quickly exchanged it with one that wasn’t in use before the event started.
Then the door of the festival finally opened!
The center of the arena was for the big guys, us we were on the ring!
The mood was very great in general: a lot of cosplays, teenagers, parents with their kids and fun person to talk to.
We also had some very friendly artist neighbours, which helps a lot when you have to stand behind the table for 8 to 10 hours in a day.
On top of that, the place itself was well organised and navigable; it happened in the past that artists were put away in a room that was really hard to access. Thankfully not the case this time!
You can see in the bottom right corner how thick the accordion zine ended up!
But now, how was the sales in all of that? Well, we were completely blown away :)
A ton of people stopped by and got our art: In total, we sold more than 150 prints, which never happened to us before ever!
We also bounced back the table cost and all the expenses to get there; train and hotel, and made some profit on top of it. Truly a massive success! I had so many conventions where I barely made my table cost back if at all, so it was super encouraging.
And as a personal win, someone even bought one of my 2 very long zines 😄 And the sticker sheets did quite alright too!
I was still very nervous during the whole event, but it’s encouraging to see all the progress we’ve made in just over a year of tabling at convention!
(also here is a video of me demonstrating than yes, this zine was actually 5 meters long)
Shoutout to our neighbors!
There is a lot of cool artist I want to shout out, but for the sake of time I especially want to highlight our table neighbors, Mar Bogdanis and Yon Made stuff :)
I really enjoyed their company and creativity, so please go check them out! Yon made a cool post about how they planned their table in 3D, definitely something I want to copy in the future!
And of course, if you haven’t already please look at my wife’s work! Their are is truly amazing and a great source of inspiration for me, and they just reached 1,000 followers on Instagram! 😄
Look at this beautiful side of the table :))
Even if we are obviously kinda close it was an honor to share the table together hehe :) I couldn’t have done it alone!
Quick wrap up!
It’s very exhausted but super happy that we packed everything and went back to Krakow… both of us a bit sad that we had to start work again the next morning.
This is why this edition of the newsletter took a bit more time to release!
Overall as you were able to tell we are really satisfied, and this event really proved us that not only could we go to other convention around the country, it was also worth it for us! So definitely something we are planning to do again in the future :)
Also, it was really fun to push myself and come up with new products and finally finishing this crazy zine idea!
Maybe I should do something again for this Inktober? We will see!
Before I leave, I just wanted to show you something that absolutely made my day 🥺 In the school my wife works in the kids needed to be occupied for a hour, and to do that they were given coloring pages of my are! Just look at it 🥰
It made me so happy to see you can't imagine! If you ever want to also color some of my artwork, they are freely available for anyone signed up to this very Newsletter, so definitely check it out(and send me a picture if you have done any ❤️)
That's it for me! I'll see you next Tuesday as we are back on regular schedule. Please have a great rest of your day!
Take care, - Nighten
This email is part of my art Newsletter. Invite a friend to join the club:
