Hello Reader! :)

Hope you're doing amazing today! I'm happy to find you again this week. This edition will be short and sweet; I have a finished illustration to show you, and a few things that inspired me this week.

I hope you'll enjoy!

But before we dive in, just a heads up to say that one of you has been selected for our monthly giveaway! The lucky winner is entitled to receive the print of their choice :D

If that's you, you probably already got an extra email from me or you'll soon have one; watch your inbox!

I had this one printed for the first time this week! 😊

Speaking of which, thank you to last month's winners for being patient with me; it took me a while to coordinate everyone, but all your packages were sent last week!

Putting the piece together

Finally! Last week I had only finished the color of my latest illustration, and now I’m happy to show you something that looks finished!

Behold!

Adding shadows and last finishing touches is always the most enjoyable part for me. That’s when everything finally comes to life!

Last week I shared with you the draft of the light my fiancée and I made; well, I also shared it on Fedi this week, and I was blown away by the amount of response!

A lot of people shared what they liked and didn’t like about each version, and it really helped me when putting down the finishing touches.

I’m overall satisfied with the result; I always find things I could have improved or done better from the beginning, but I’m trying to be proud of what I do despite this :)

And now I’m looking forward to showing you what I’ll be cooking next!

Quick motion experiment

So one of my side quests this week was experimenting with motion in my previous illustration: what if I animated some of them?

I obviously don’t have the time to work on fully featured frame-by-frame animation (I prefer illustration anyway!), but I was curious about a simple way to do it. Turns out, with some shaders it’s actually possible to do some interesting motion!

Here’s one of my illustrations through this process!

What do you think?

I feel like it’s a bit motion sickness inducing haha, but there might be something interesting with a bit of refinement :)

Here’s another one, way more subtle:

(look at the cables and the bushes, it's easy to miss but they are moving!)

I’m not doing anything with them for now; it was just fun and interesting to see what is possible! But who knows, I might find a use for it someday.

Cool ideas for the week

Pixel art is cool, isn’t it? This week I found Pixel Converter, a very cool website to convert images to pixel art by combining effects and color palettes from old consoles. If, like me, you love crunchy pixels and retro games, I encourage you to play around with your own pictures!

I’ve heard a few times about this idea of color hunting/color rally, where you need to take pictures of a specific color while walking around in the city. I think it’s a super cool idea; it would be fun to do it someday!