Hey there Reader!

Boy, is the year starting off strong, both with highs and lows. That’s at least what my week looked like. I hope yours went the way you like it!

Today I want to go over some of the inspiring things that I’ve seen this week, as a very special project I’m excited to share with you :D

Something very different but I know some of you might like it!

Let’s dive in!

Paris Under the Snow ❄️

Let me tell you what happened to me last week!

So you might know that for my day job I work remotely, but once a year I need to leave Poland and spend 2 days in Paris to kick off the year with my colleagues.

This is always a good opportunity for me to stroll around Paris, which is a big inspiration for my illustrations :)

Last year I already shared some pictures of roofs!

But this year something very special happened: it snowed!

And not a little: the day after I arrived, a massive amount of snow was covering the streets. Parisians are really not used to snow, let alone this amount. I never thought I would ever see the city under the snow, so I felt extremely blessed to be there exactly on time!

The morning when I was supposed to meet my colleagues, I left the hotel a bit early to just wander around with my camera.

This one is blurry, but this add to the atmosphere!

The streets completely white, not shoveled yet (I told you Parisians are not used to snow), a few pedestrians and practically no cars… this really felt magical.

I ended up getting lost and a bit late for my meeting, but this was worth it! The next day it almost all gone.

And it’s incredible that this happened the week after I completed my first snowy illustration :) Now I want to do it again!

The print is still available for preorder in case you missed it!

In any case, I hope you enjoyed those pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them!

I made an Animated Show!

Yes! That’s the special project I was talking about! :)

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on an “animated” series pilot, and this weekend I was finally able to complete it entirely! Here it is uploaded to YouTube:

Now, let’s talk a bit about it!

It all started with me wanting to share more of my world and stories with you, more regularly.

But I didn’t want to work on a gigantic project for months like I did with my children book earlier last year (and with all the issues I had when publishing it). And I still want to have time to make the really detailed illustration you’ve come to love from me.

I thought of telling stories through comics, for example, but those require a lot of work.

That’s where I remembered the animated web series Epithet Erased, which uses a hand puppet style for its animation. Characters cycle and reuse pre-made poses instead of being redrawn for every scene.

You can see the first episode here for comparison:

And thinking about it more, I realized that I already knew how to do something like this: for years I was working on visual novels, which have a very similar presentation. I was already pretty proficient at making characters move in the same way as Epithet Erased, so why not give it a shot again?

So that’s how this experiment came to be! I picked one of my favorite locations from my Inktober project, Emi’s Laundry Café, and used it to imagine a light-hearted animated sitcom.

And instead of learning an animation software or spending months on a pilot I simply used what I knew and made a scenario, a background and some characters with expressions to see how it would look :)

This is how the first version looked like around Christmas!

What’s interesting is that now making a new episode is simply writing a new script — the groundwork is already done!

But I want to know your opinion on this: would you be interested in seeing more of this, along with new illustrations? What would interest you in such a format?

I really want to hear your opinion on this! I’m making art for you to enjoy after all, so your feedback is very precious to me.

How I Almost Got Locked Out of Drawing this Week

Oh! I only talked about the highs of the week, but let me tell you about one of the lows!

I came back on Friday from Paris with a new work laptop that I also use for drawing (if you are my boss reading this, I’m very sorry haha). It’s a brand new MacBook and I’m very excited to see what it has in store, only to be greeted with this message:

My tablet, a Cintiq 13HD that I bought 8 years ago for what felt like half of my life savings, is no longer supported! And I checked: this wasn’t a mistake. Nothing could make it work again!

At the time this was the biggest investment I had ever done in myself

Thankfully, someone on Fedi pointed me towards OpenTabletDriver, a community project that thankfully maintains older models like this.

But it was a very stressful afternoon, looking for a solution and wondering if I had reached an unskippable paywall to continue digital drawing :’)

Thankfully, all is good now!

Before I go!

Quick reminder that our acrylic keychains are still available on my Art Shop! :) Those were never available before, not even at conventions, so go take a look and grab the ones you like!