I opened My Print Shop! ✨ Here's what happened in the first week
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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! :)
I hope you’re doing fantastic!
My week has been so intense that it feels like I haven’t written to you in a long while; today I want to tell you about everything that happened after I officially opened my print shop, and also some of the art I worked on in the meantime!
I was really scared to do it, but I ran out of excuses and finally pushed the publish button!
I announced it in early access for you (the newsletter subscribers!) on Tuesday, and later more broadly on my socials.
The result?
Well first let’s give you some context about my expectation:
to be fully transparent, when visualizing in my head how this “launch” would go, I was guessing that I would sell around 3 prints. Yes, just 3. One or two from family and friends, and maybe one from a stranger on the internet.
(don’t ask why this exact number haha, I guess making things up in my mind is part of my job as an artist)
Yes, as you can tell I was really not expecting much!
In fact, that was reflected in one of the most glaring issues on the website: you couldn’t add items to the cart!
Yes, really!
Purchasing an item would send you directly to the checkout, and could be done only one at the time. Strange, right? Even more strange, the reason wasn’t a technical issue; it was intentional!
When I first set up the site, I had such abysmal confidence that I truly couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to get more than one print from the shop. Having a cart requires a lot more clicks and you might forget about it afterwards, so why not simplify the process entirely?
Yes, I went out of my way to make a new buy button that would make the purchase super simple and fast, in theory, but made it super annoying in practice. And it took me so long to realize that it was a problem!
Thankfully, it’s now completely back to normal; the cart is accessible once again, as it should be! But I sincerely apologize for the oversight - it really was just that I wasn’t expecting such a warm reception from you guys :)
Because yes, my expectations were completely blown away!
In the span of a week (or just a weekend if you subtract the early access for newsletter members), 14 prints have been sold! That was way, way more than I ever expected :D
Packing orders :)
And to top the irony, most people bought multiple prints at the same time!
To be honest with you, in retrospect, I wish I had made the stock even more limited; not because I don’t have enough prints at hand, but because sending and packing this many orders is already a bit overwhelming. I’m super grateful of course, but I wasn’t expecting that many!
This is part of the reason why the shop will be closed temporarily during the holiday season: simply because I will be traveling to visit my family! But also, more broadly, because I’m just a one-man shop, not a big corporation with logistics and employees to rely on.
Nonetheless, this shop is a very important step for me, and it’s not going away anytime soon :) It will simply not be active when I cannot run it!
My love is in making more art for you guys, and I want this to be my main focus!
If you are interested in high-quality reproductions of my art and want to receive yours before Christmas, you can order now at this link!
PS: I’ve reworked the main page to be more pleasant to browse as well, feel free to check it out again! :)
Blue screen at the post office while I was sending the packages :(
Preparing my next illustration
Now I want to share with you some of the art I’ve done this week!
After finishing Promenade (my last big illustration) and my massive Inktober project (both taking the entire month to complete), I’ve been wondering what would be my main illustration that I’ll be working on:
During this research, I’ve made this location sketch - a cosy and rusty café :)
You can see a little fan at the bar!
A rusty place to get a fresh drink 🌿 The structure is made from a recycled shipping container. It’s very sturdy, but the solar panels on the roof are mostly there to keep the drinks and the waiter fresh - it gets pretty hot inside during the summer!
I imagine this one set next to the shared garden, if you remember this location from my Inktober project!
I realized afterwards that the fact that the café is using a shipping container was inspired by a very special café I came across when I was visiting Japan this summer!
The location is called Time Drip Coffee in Hamamatsu, a coastal city between Tokyo and Nagoya.
What a cool design!
To be honest, I don’t necessarily recommend visiting the city; but finding this place and enjoying some iced coffee was such a beautiful highlight in the middle of the excruciatingly hot Japanese summer.
Back to the sketch, I really enjoyed thinking about the little details, like what kind of furniture this place could have, what the solar panels are useful for, or making sure there is a little terrace in front, in case the ground becomes muddy.
I have talked about it previously, but it has become very important to think about these little details, and make sure that what I put in my illustrations is believable. I'll explain!
What I mean is best exemplified in what is now my current big illustration. This first sketch was just a warmup! :)
For this illustration I wanted it to be set in one of the parks of my fictional city (the reason will be evident later). I started gathering references, remembering the pictures I took in Japan, with beautiful ponds and vegetation despite the heat.
I started by making a mood board first; and I can tell you that it’s very satisfying to have most of them taken by me during the trip :)
I took all those pictures except the 3 at the very top!
Now, to continue on this theme of paying attention to believable details, it turns out that I learned quite a few things already!
First thing, about the stairs! Do you know how steep stairs typically are? At which angle do they rise? Try to guess if you have some where you live.
I assumed it was around 45°, but it turns out actually way less steep! Usually around 36°, which is much gentler than I thought. Which makes sense, especially in a public park.
Although I will not measure the steps I'm not that crazy
Okay, this might sound ridiculous to pay attention to this when it’s really not supposed to be the focus. But I find the result way more appealing than the sharp angle I’d done at first, so I’m satisfied!
And it makes me very happy when I can learn something about the world when doing my illustrations :)
Another important thing I learned was about the plants: you see those lily pads in the water? I never had a pond let alone lilies, so I didn’t know how they worked. I was planning to spread them all along the shore of the pond - we saw a few examples of those in Hamamatsu actually!
But what I learned was that not only do lily pads flourish in still water, which is easy to guess, but they also disintegrate if placed next to a stream!
Since I also wanted a little waterfall, I made sure to take this into account when placing the lilies.
Now, why care so much about this?
The shallow answer is that for this illustration I want to challenge myself to draw plants with higher fidelity. I’ve been inspired by a few of my fellow artists’ recent posts.
I’m truly impressed by how well they can capture the likeness of plants. This is something I want to improve at!
And this is the reason why I wanted the illustration set in a park 🌱
But the other reason for seeking believably is to show that a human is behind the art. To make it feel like someone understood what they were drawing, instead of creating an image that looks good at first but falls apart once you start questioning it.
Of course, this is a standard you can push and never truly reach - and I don’t want to, I draw fiction after all! But this is an ideal I want to strive towards at my humble level.
I like how this sketch is turning out already! And I look forward to continuing to expand what I can do, while keeping the serene atmosphere you’ve come to expect from me :)
I’m taking this opportunity to sincerely thank you for your continuous support! You guys are very kind, and the warm reception to the shop opening is only one example of that!
