Hello Reader! :)

Hope you're doing well, as usual! This week I want to go over with you on not only my progress on my illustration, but also an unfortunate event that (almost) prevented me to draw for an entire day.

You'll see, I found a way 😄

But before we dive in! In case you don't know, every first week of the month I'm choosing subscribers at random and send them a free print! I've been doing this since I started this newsletter more than a year ago :)

But last year there has been a few cases of winners who didn't received the email, didn't get the package, or simply didn't respond when I told them they have been selected. So to catch up with it, I decided to do something special today:

Five of you have been selected this month for the monthly giveaway!

So don't forget to check your inbox for any extra email this week, because your chance of being selected suddenly got 5 times higher ;)

Not related to today's topic but look at those ceramic foxes my fiancée made 🥺

The Garden is all coming together 🌱

I’ve been working on this illustration almost 3 weeks ago now, and I’m very happy to see it coming to an end :)

This week was focused on adjusting all the flat colors and the lineart. Since I use a single round brush for my illustration this step is super important to create enough depth before tackling the light. I need all the help I can get to make the drawing readable!

After this it was time to add the light to all the bushes and trees; after this and a few adjustments, I’m basically done!

There are still some things I might tweak before adding it to my gallery, but I’m already pretty satisfied with the result!

Actually to be honest, even if I wanted to I really couldn’t work more on it this weekend. And this leads us to the next section:

How I injured my arm (and found a way to draw anyway)

Last week I started to feel a slight discomfort when bending my right forearm; a bit similar to when I did curls at the gym and pushed a bit too much… But nothing to worry about I thought.

And I mostly forgot about it for the rest of the week, until the weekend started: something was definitely wrong with my tendons. I could manage most of the time, but some movements were difficult to do, until my body let me know that it had too much and needed rest.

The pain culminated on Sunday were it was hard to draw or even type for a few minutes; that’s where I decided to take it seriously, especially because I had a whole work week ahead of me the next day.

Thankfully I had made good progress on the illustration by then! 🌿

I setup voice dictation, tried to cook with one hand… but as you can imagine going about my day was not very practical, and I quickly ran out of things I could do.

But that’s where I had a idea: wouldn’t it be fun to draw with my left hand?

So I turned to social and started taking suggestion from people!

I’m far from ambidextrous, and I think it shows, but I had a lot of fun doodling :)

And you know, that got me thinking about how my mindset has been shaped a lot by writing this newsletter: now when something bad happens to me, my first thought is:

“Hey, that’s gonna be an interesting story to tell later!”

And this has helped me frame events I wasn’t even planning to share here! Even if you don’t post anything online, I really recommend this perspective whenever you’re going through something bad or just annoying. When applicable, it makes everything more tolerable!

Some quick inspo for the week!

I stumbled upon some interesting art this week!

I found the work of Japanese artist Kaminashi, and I was really inspired by their style. The artist makes very cute doodles by themselves, but what I find interesting is how they use graphic design to put them forward:

I love the idea of mixing artworks with text, pictures, icon, patterns… and I think here it’s coming together very well.

Definitely something I’d want to try out myself in the future! (maybe when my arm has fully recovered haha)

You can find their work here: https://potofu.me/kaminashi

Here we go, that's it for this week!

I was very late writing this entry (I'm typing this a few hour before sending), but I'm happy to say that I'm feeling better and I can type without issue :)

Thank you for your support, check your inbox and your spam in case you receive something extra from me, and I'll see you next week in any case!

Take care,
- Nighten