Art & Inspiration letters from NIGHTEͶ (Nathan Guilhot)
This is not just a newsletter — it's my personal magazine documenting my creative journey.
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Hi Reader!
How are you today? Me I’m happy to say that my arm is doing much better :)
Today we will go through the start of my next illustration, as well as a ton of inspiration I came across this week! Some really good stuff you’ll see!
Let’s dive in!
The last (last) finishing touches
Before moving on to the next one, I wanted to quickly show you once again how my last illustration turned out :)
As expected, since last week I kept adjusting some colors and lights, and now I can finally call it done! (for real this time)
This illustration will be available very soon in my gallery and as a coloring page for newsletter subscribers!
Frame within frame
So, what does it look like when I start a new illustration?
Often it starts with a simple idea, “I want to draw a pond,” or even just “I want to recreate this photo.” But sometimes I have a vague concept in mind and I’m trying to discover what art could come from it (“hope”, “solarpunk” or “bliss”).
So this week, the concept I had in mind was “Frame within a frame”; the idea was to have an illustration in two planes with a nice contrast, separated by a canvas or a window.
My ideation process is a bit different each time, but this week I started finding inspiration and doodled some thumbnails digitally. The goal was to create a nice composition to get me started:
Here I use very big brushes and no colors to allow my imagination to fill in the gaps. I then picked the one I liked the most and made a version of it in my sketchbook; this helps a lot to look at the idea from a new angle.
As you can see, I was pretty keen on this idea of a cat sitting by the window, so I went with it :) After a few more iterations back on digital, here is the sketch I came up with!
For the anecdote, I took a picture of our living room’s radiator as a reference :D I think it's obvious that our cosy apartment is very inspiring to me haha
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I already started the ink, hopefully I can show you even more progress next week :)
Looking back: My very first game is almost a decade old!
Few of you might know, but before I really dived deep into illustration a few years ago I was actually completely focused on making games and visual novels!
If you go look at my itch.io page, there are more than 20 games there! (most of them pretty bad haha)
And today I want to celebrate the anniversary of a very special one! :)
It’s a very simple game, and I made most of it in about a 12-hour rush as an exercise to learn programming. Incidentally, this mostly taught me how to finish projects.
You see, that's something I always struggled with before.
The goal is to keep the ball in the air while collecting those yellow dots
I know this is something a lot of other creative people are stuck on: getting an idea; it grows, evolves, and gets out of scope until you land on a better idea you’d prefer to work on...
I was, for many years, stuck in this loop. But after this first victory of releasing a small flawed project, a complete things I can show to people, it flicked a switch in 17 years old me!
Not that it solves everything forever, but after this I had the proof that I could get something finished.
At the time I was _very_ proud to have coded a leaderboard by myself :D
So, if that’s your case, try to focus on the smallest possible project you can finish today(or tomorrow if you don’t have time; I don’t want you to stress yourself too much haha). Anything, no matter how small, as long as it feels finished to you.
Because the world needs finished things, more than ever :)
My inspiration for this week!
I very rarely go to the cinema, and I really mean it. For example, in 2022 I only saw one movie (and to add insult to injury, it was Sonic 2).
But this week, I was invited to see an animated movie I knew nothing about: Little Amélie or the Character of Rain.
Those colors!!
It’s adapted from a French novel, “La métaphysique des tubes,” which I also knew nothing about.
In fact, going into the projection room, I hadn’t even seen the poster or the trailer; it wasn’t displayed or advertised anywhere in the cinema! A very surreal experience, as you can imagine.
I came in with no expectation, which made me even more blown away by the film! It’s beautiful, poetic, funny, while still addressing serious life topics…
If you like my art, I’m sure you’ll fall in love with the beautiful art direction and how cosy it feels. I don’t want to tell you more in case you want, just like I did, to watch it without knowing anything about it :)
But in case you need more convincing, here is the trailer!
