Good morning Reader! :)

Hope you're doing fantastic this week! I'm so happy to see everything outside turning back to green recently!
As you might know, it has been a bit hectic for me recently, but it's getting calmer now -- and this week I still have art to show you ✨ A lot actually! Let's start :D

Oh boy that’s a lot of roofs

I’m so happy that today I finally have progress to show on my next illustration!

To get you up to speed: Last October I did a series of 31 drawings set in my fictional city, and I recently started to turn some of them into full illustration!

This is my second one for now, showing the coast and the eastern port. This week I finally was able to complete the ink! Here’s how it looks like:

Yep, like I said a lot of roofs, and as you can guess it’s the one further away that took me the longest to get right :')

When drawing a lot of elements like this, I need to make sure that I use varied shapes to break the monotony, but also that everything looks coherent enough (if all the buildings looked vastly different it would be a distracting mess). For this I had a lot of references at hand; one of them being the old port in Marseilles!

I’ve never been there actually, but since the project is about a coastal european-style city this was a good reference - just maybe with less boats haha

To come back to the roofs, this illustration is actually an excuse for me to resolve a frustration I’ve had for a while now:

you see, back in June 2024 I completed the illustration “She is free”, and this was a major step up for me in terms of details. Just like this one, I drew a sea of roofs, just look at it:

But if you look at the actual illustration, it’s barely visible!

This is because to create depth I lighted the lines of elements far away, but this ruined a lot of the details I spent so much time drawing! That’s why now I’m happy to go back to this subject, and hopefully do it justice this time!

I’m looking forward to show you some colors next week! 🏘️

My Saturday drawing in a café :)

I work from home, I draw from home, and all in all I don’t have many opportunities to go outside and meet people. But that’s why I was especially happy this weekend to go to an artist meeting organized by a friend!

We met in a café and started to draw and chat, and it turns out that when I have coffee and focus time to draw I can do quite a lot! This was a good opportunity to revisit one of the references I got from France last week, and as you see I got pretty passionate about this rock:

It was very fun and relaxing to draw all of the details - I didn’t get all of them correct, but it’s still satisfying 😄

Drawing with pencils, at least for me, gets very close to sculpting in the process: defining the rough shapes, chiseling the forms, marking the details deeper and deeper… since I’ve mostly done digital these past few months, so it was a great change of pace.

Another thing I drew was those cats silhouettes I also took a picture of. I’ve always struggled to draw cats consistently so maybe drawing their shadow would help!

And here is one small drawing from the zoo in Wrocław that I visited sometime ago :)

I’m super happy I went to this meeting, looking forward to next time!

Cool links of the week!

• I played this very interesting web game where the levels loop infinitely on themselves; mind bending and a nice break! :)

• Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes 🐀🎵

• Speaking of bangers, my recommendation got blessed by the soundtrack of Barbie Beauty Boutique (strong recommend)

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Alright, thank you for being here with me today!
I'll see you again next Tuesday, in the meantime thank you so much for following my art journey, and I wish you a wonderful week!

Take care,
- Nighten

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