Hi Reader! :)

I hope you’re having a lovely week! Heatwaves hits pretty hard here but we're holding up!

Today I'm super excited to share with you the story of my latest art market, and everything around it, from the preparation to the good lessons learned along the way.

We have a lot to cover so let’s dive in!

Turning my sketchbook into mini prints

Let's roll back a few days before the market, when I was still preparing what to show there!

You might remember that last week I was experimenting with drawing digitally, in a way that feels closer to my sketchbook.

Well, I redrew a few more of those sketches on my tablet, and after a few iterations I finally found a brush and style I liked!

It’s quite different from my usual illustrations, but it was really fun. I played with texture, with elements peeking out of the frame… I’m not fully used to it yet, but hey, that was fun :)

And it's crazy how fast I can go with that style!

The sketchy style and colours help me letting go having everything perfect when zoomed up close; the opposite of what I usually do in short.

My usual illustrations can take almost a month to finish. Having another, quicker way to make art feels very nice, especially when I just want to try something and see where it goes.

In the end I had a full page ready, so the day before the market, I printed some of those sketches as mini prints. I had no idea if people would be interested, but finding out was the goal of the experiment!

I want to throw things at the wall and see what I can learn, while having fun in the process :)

Printing a lot of new things

But of course I needed my real prints in addition to those minis!

For this market I printed more than 150 prints, most of these from designs I had basically never printed before.

I got them from my local printer, to whom we have been costumers for more than a year. It’s funny that I don’t even need to speak when I pick up my prints anymore, they know who I am 😄

This time, I was especially happy with how the blue colours of Aquarium Date popped in print. It looked really good!

Not everything went perfectly of course. For example one of the purple cat illustrations came out very dark :(

I’m not really used to printing dark images, so that’s a good learning experience for next time. I thought it was practically unsellable…

Speaking of prints, I also bought a new display for them!

The ones I had before were too vertical and had a big tendency to fall whenever people shuffled the prints around. And when one print at the top fell, it was a domino effect! :')

So I’m very happy to have something proper this time. For the removed stress alone, it was worth it.

Our best art market yet!

Alright, now onto the actual even itself! This Sunday, we were at Targi Unikatów, a local art market here in Kraków.

In case you don't know, I'm doing conventions and market with a group of art friends for more than a year now! :)

We were incredibly lucky to get the table we wanted: a double table in a corner, so a great place for people to walk past us!

The convention was inside a big entertainment centre, with bars, a ton of restaurants, arcade machines and flippers… Definitely the strangest place we have ever done a convention in, but I think that made it even more fun.

It was under the protection of the neon Pespsi sign that we started welcoming our first few customers 😌

All put together, we had a very long table shared between six people; I think it's the highest we've ever been to an event! So it was still a bit crammed, obviously, but surprisingly my art did super well this time!

What people connected with

I was extra surprised bacause at Ryucon, the anime convention we did a few weeks ago, my art did not catch as much attention at all. I think a lot of people there were looking for fanart, which is something I don’t do at all.

But at this market, people seemed much more interested in gifts or decoration for their home. And the new designs were hits!

Aquarium Date and Quiet Afternoon were the clear winners.

For Quiet Afternoon, the one with the cat by the window, I guess it’s not too surprising. It’s a cosy illustration with a cat, and cats are the only fandom that works whatever event you’re in 😄

But the whole experience made me realise that I need to be more diligent about sharing new art. I had left some of these designs on my hard drive for way too long, and now I can finally learn from how people react to them!

Everyone has their role

There was one interesting thought I had during the event.

Even though my art was selling pretty well, during the event I was a bit sad seeing that I couldn’t help a lot with the selling itself.

You see, I live in Poland but my Polish is not that great yet (although I’m more and more incognito!), so selling is challenging. But honestly, even in any language, I often have trouble making a good connection with people. Frustrating!

But my fiancée, who is also part of the collective, pointed out that we all have our role in this group. Some people are very good at selling, others at managing social media or planning the next events.

Me, well, I’m a bit taller and can carry heavy things, which comes in handy when setting up the stall 😄

But I also built our whole custom point-of-sale system: basically a little website to keep track of every order and split the earnings in the end. It’s really made for us and our need as they arise. It even makes a Ka-Ching sound, which makes us smile every time :)

I couldn’t imagine tracking sales in a notebook now, I can’t even do maths in my head let alone while talking to someone!

So I do end up having my little role, even if it's not always a front-facing one.

I’ll continue trying to help as much as I can of course. But it was an interesting thing to realise, especially because I’m more used to working on my own and having everything fall on me.

There is a lot more on the way with the collective, and I’m excited to share it with you soon :)

In the meantime, please check out my friends if you haven't already!

• ​ArtNest (the collective as a whole)
• ​Astheri​
• ​Ada Guzik​
• ​Connie​
• ​Happy Skull​

What I learned from this market

With my art, I understand a bit better how people connect with my art now. I need to keep putting new things out there instead of leaving them on my digital shelf!

The mini prints also gave me a new way to experiment. I can still make the bigger illustrations I love, but now I have this alternate digital sketch style to have fun with too.

And I understand a little more about my role in the collective and how we can work together. I still have a lot to learn, but it feels good to see where I can contribute :)

Now for the money side, I don't expect to do as well every time but I'm happy to have made up my table cost as well as the money spent on printing. Can't complain really!

It was with suitcases slightly lighter that we came back home, about to start a new week.

No more daily videos!

Oh yeah, remember that I was posting videos every single day recently? Well if you've been following it you might have noticed that the channel has been completely silent this week!

Yep, here I'm officially announcing the end of this challenge, it was a good run :D 70+ videos!

I really wanted to push to 100 videos, but oh well. The ironic thing is that I wanted to record a video about the end of daily videos, but I didn’t have the time. And that’s kind of the point!

Since starting my new job, I have had less time and energy to record; even filming on duty didn't help haha

But my priorities have changed too. I want to focus my energy back not only on my art, but especially on my wedding, which is arriving in just a few weeks :)

Framed like this, yeah, it makes a lot more sense not to spend too much time on YouTube for now. Not the highest priority!

The original goal of this challenge was to improve my speaking, become more comfortable on camera, and hopefully say interesting things every day. At least I tried!

I'm very happy that I now feel at ease on camera, and I have the conviction that I can do this kind of things at all with enough focus.

A few years ago, I was literally shaking just recording my voice. I guess once you’ve done something more than 70 times, it’s not that scary anymore.

I learned a lot more from this challenge, but I want to keep this section short not too long. I’ll do a proper recap later in a video! But I really hope that one of my videos was useful or interesting to some of you :D

I know some of you also want to start posting online or make videos like this, do you have any questions or things that personally block you getting your voice out there? I’d be very happy to help in any way, so please don’t hesitate to reply to this email! :)

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Alright, that’s it from me this week :)

Thank you so much for reading, and thank you to everyone who came to see us at the market. I’m really excited to keep experimenting, sharing new art, and seeing where all of this goes! And I have a lot to look forward to ❤️

Take care,
- Nighten

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​https://club.nighten.fr​

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