Art & Inspiration letters from NIGHTEͶ (Nathan Guilhot)
My personal magazine documenting my creative journey :)
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Hi there Reader!
How are you this week? On my side I’m finally finding my rythm again after starting my new job and surviving a big convention last week, and I have a lot of art to show you! My own, and the one that inspired me recently :)
Let’s dive in!
Planning my new illustration series 🐈
As I said last week, Ryucon really fueled me to create new things and experiment more!
I decided to put aside my unfinished illustration that spent too much time in the oven, and start planning for a new series; and my main guideline this time was about constraints.
You see, one thing that I realised this week was that having constraints was not only a great creative exercise, but also the key to stay passionate about your craft, whatever it is!
I talk about it in one of this week’s video actually, I’d recommend giving it a watch if you want to expand on this topic! Don’t be surprised, I yap a lot about Quake for half the video, but it’s all gonna make sense at the end. Trust me 😄
One thing I was very interested in trying was to do something similar than my illustration “Pink Street”:
Back then I used a very limited color palette, bigger brush and wonky lines, and I think it plays a lot in the illustration appeal!
So I browsed and picked a palette on Lospec (very good website initially aimed towards pixel artists), divided my usual canvas into 16 little frames, and started doodling compositions :)
The story of a little cat in nature started to emerge as I was working on it. I was inspired by this Princess Mononoke artwork that my fiancee made recently:
But why 16 composition? Well it was just easy to divide the canvas this way, but doing that many also really helped pushing my imagination. Not all of those sketches are winners, but that was a good exercise; and I would have missed a lot of good ones if I didn’t went the extra mile!
So you might have picked up on it, but the purple and yellow color palette I used is very similar to the non-binary flag 😄 And it’s even funnier that I started to use it on the 14th of July which is Non-Binary People’s Day. Happy coincidence I guess!
During the weekend I got stuck in a train for more than 4 hours, so I took the opportunity to sketch my favourite compositions on paper :)
The goal was first select the composition I want to finish, and also define a bit more clearly what kind of details I want to use, instead of just relying on the color blobs.
Once I finally got access to my computer again, I started upscaling and creating the final version of one of the illustration! The linework is not as thin as I usually do it, so took waaay less time to finish, especially with the limited color palette.
But as I was finishing the refined sketch and then the finished ink, I had a very scary realisation: The more I worked on it, the less I liked the illustration :(
I think I overworked some of the details and it made the image feel too “busy”, loosing the charm of the original blob version. That’s not a problem I was expecting to be honest! But I think I can adjust it further and get to a place where I like it more :D That’s gonna be my goal this week!
For this series, I’m actually quite motivated to have a few ready very soon because we might go to another convention in a couple of weeks! So this is the perfect deadline I need to be able to present my new work.
And I’m excited to show you my progress along the way!
I’m curious btw, which of the composition do you like the most? I will not do all of them, but maybe your favourite will be next!
This is a reference study to warm up for nature scenes 🍃
Here are the weekly Youtube videos!
As you may know, I’m still uploading a new video every single day in the background; and we are getting close to 70 videos total! Pretty exciting milestone :)
Why I Keep Making Videos Nobody Watches To celebrate the 2 months of this video challenge, I wanted to go back over what pushes me to continue even tho (almost) nobody watches those video 😌
Lur Noise is publishing her comic one page at the time, and I’m always stunned by the beautiful details and colors. Go learn more here :)
“How to look at art” by Lynda Barry
Alright, this is all from me this week :D Thank you for following along, what do you think of the new illustration series? I'm looking forward to show you more of them next Tuesday.
In the meantime, please enjoy the rest of your day, and as always,
Take care, - Nighten
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