Art & Inspiration letters from NIGHTEͶ (Nathan Guilhot)
My personal magazine documenting my creative journey :)
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Good morning day Reader! :D
If you're wondering, yes -- this issue of the newsletter is later than usual.
I was hoping to publish it Tuesday morning like I always do, but as I'll talk about in a bit, I've been out of town and way busier than planned last week. I didn't want to rush this one, because I have some cool things to share, so I hope you understand :)
Let's get started!
How I was forced to draw on iPad for a week
Not sure if I mentioned clearly last time, but since I’m in between jobs at the moment I had some vacation time!
We decided to fly to France and spend some time with my family, and it was really nice. It was a occasion to rest, despite the heat wave (oh boy it was intense).
And because it was so hot, we didn’t go out much, so I was excited to spend time inside, play games, and obviously draw a bit.
I had everything planned. I brought my tablet and even a support for it, all the cables, my laptop… everything was ready for me to be productive with my free time. But fate decided otherwise, because I had only one thing missing: my stylus! The actual pen I need to use my tablet was completely missing, and still on my desk in Poland :’)
My tablet turned into a very bad second display, and I couldn’t do anything about it...
I was a bit bummed out, but honestly, it felt like a great opportunity to finally get out of my comfort zone and bring some variety to my process. And thanks to my partner, who always works on iPad and was kind enough to lend me their tablet, I was able to scratch that art itch and have something to show you :D
So today I’m excited to report on my adventures, trials, and tribulations in making my first full illustration on an iPad!
First impressions
First thing I did was play around with the brushes. Procreate, the drawing app I’ll be using, has a wide variety of them, with plenty of patterns and texture effects, which is interesting. But as you know if you’ve seen my artwork, I really don’t use any of that haha
Still, it was fun to play around with it for a bit.
Here are some doodles I did, the first one from imagination:
The first thing I noticed was the texture of the tablet surface, or the lack thereof.
The iPad has a completely smooth glass surface, which is very good for touch control, but it was very hard to get used to it at first.
I’ve heard there are overlays you can put on the screen to add paper-like texture, but apparently it mutes the colors slightly. Even then, if I had my own iPad, I would definitely get one.
One thing I can give it credit for, however, is that since the surface is so smooth, it makes it very effortless to draw. For example on the plane back, I was able to draw for more than two hours straight without my hand feeling strained. Pretty neat!
Back to the beginning, I kept playing around with the textures and different brushes, but honestly, my heart still lies with clear, solid lines and flat colors.
tying some more watercolor effects, but quickly came back to the round brush
That’s what I love most in my illustrations, and whenever I do a new one, I want it to be coherent with the rest of my work. So it was time to put Procreate to the test and try to do a real illustration, one that would fit perfectly in my gallery.
Now the challenges
So as I started sketching, I noticed very quickly that the software was smoothing my lines, meaning removing some of the jitter that comes with the pencil. This is something I actually use when I work in Krita on desktop, but here it was much stronger than I expected.
Turns out it was a setting my partner had adjusted for their own needs and preferences. And as you can imagine, there was no way I was going to change their setting and mess with their workflow!
But I really wish there was a way to turn it off completely, because especially when doing hatching or filling large areas it was getting in the way. But thankfully it wasn’t a deal breaker, just something to get used to.
Speaking of lines, I also didn’t have a glove that was at my size, which I thought would be a much bigger issue. But the default palm rejection worked well in the end, even though more than a dozen times I found random spots of color that weren’t intentional and had to be cleaned up.
As I progressed through the illustration, I noticed a very real limitation for my usual workflow: the super limited layer amount.
I’ve shared this with you before, but it’s not rare that I have more than 100, even 200 layers in a single illustration. I really love to separate all the little elements and colors into their own layers so I can adjust them later and tweak the values. It sounds crazy, but it’s very handy!
The final ink layer :) It was so satisfying to reach this point this quickly!
Procreate has a strict limitation on the number of layers, and it depends on the size of your canvas, so how many pixels are there. And I like to draw lots of details, because I want them to appear correct when printed, so I usually go very large for my artwork. But this time I was limited to only 26 layers in total. I felt a bit claustrophobic 😄
What I ended up doing was working on the sketch in a smaller document, so I could manipulate and tweak the details I needed, then export the image to the final canvas size to do the ink and colors. I had to restrain myself a bit, but I think it worked out in the end.
So, what was I actually drawing? :)
As you can probably tell, it’s a picture from Japan!
I took it myself last year, almost exactly a year ago, when we were hiking the Nakasendo, the historical samurai trail that connects Tokyo and Kyoto. We didn’t walk the whole thing, mind you, just a small segment.
This picture was taken at the point where we actually joined the trail (you can recognize it by the different pavement on the asphalt)
I really love this tree leaning over the street. Actually, I wanted to find the exact location where it was taken, so I went on Google Street View, started from the train station where we departed, and worked my way towards the place so I could locate it precisely. Here is the link if you want to explore it yourself :)
It was a bit emotional for me to go through this hike again, even virtually. I remember the hike was very hard, it was very hot, my legs were hurting, and we were exhausted. But I still cherish those memories very deeply 😊
And to come back to the illustration, I’m satisfied with the progress I made!
I practically finished the colors and was starting the shading on the way back. There is still a lot I need to work on, but I’m excited to show you the final thing next week!
I’ll finish this illustration before going back to the regular schedule and the one I started recently :)
What I learned with this fun experiment
So, will I switch completely to iPad for my future illustrations?
At the beginning my answer was clearly no. I have so many automatisms in place with Krita and my graphic tablet: I know exactly which brush pixel size to use for each step of the process for example. And I’ve been doing the same thing for two years now!
But for this very reason, breaking my usual workflow was more than welcome. Now I know that if I had to switch to iPad, I could probably manage. Because the most important part is to create art for you and other people to enjoy, not exactly the precise tool I use.
More importantly, what I learned during this challenge was that very low friction to create, to be able to pull out the tablet and draw wherever, is key for making rapid progress.
Typically when I draw digitally, I need to sit down at my computer, plug in at least one or two sockets for both my tablet and laptop, connect the HDMI and USB cable for the tablet via an adapter, open custom drivers to make my old tablet work on macOS since support has been dropped, and be seated correctly to use all my keyboard shortcuts.
That’s a lot of constraints, and I think it’s been limiting me for a while.
I don’t know exactly what I’ll do next, but this was a very interesting, humbling, and surprisingly satisfying experience!
What do you think on your end? Are you like me, very stuck in your ways and habits, or do you like to try many new things? What’s the determining factor for you to make something stick long-term?
I’m interested in hearing your opinion, whether it’s also about art or anything else you’re doing in your life :)
Before I go, I have a few videos to share with you that have been posted since last time, some of which I’m quite proud of.
Speaking of which, I’m excited to film more this week! I have a lot of ideas for videos, because it turns out, even posting every single day, I still have more ideas than time to film them! :D
By doing so many, I’m figuring out what I really care about speaking about and also what resonates with you guys.
Any thought on those subjects are very welcome btw :) I really love the comments I got either on Mastodon or Youtube itself, so please don’t hesitate!
That's it for me for this newsletter! Thank you so much for reading along. This has been long enough already, so I'll keep my cool links and inspiration for next time ;)
In the meantime, have a great rest of your week, smile, and please, as always,
Take care, - Nighten
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