Welcome back Reader!

Good to see you there, I hope you're having a good week so far :)

May is a pretty calm month for me, so I've taken the time to do important things I was putting off and, obviously, make more art! We'll go over my sketchbook and my main illustration project, but first an important notice:

Sortie’s got an update!

Maybe you remember that 2 weeks ago I released an app called Sortie, that allows you to organize and search your local pictures in an instant.

Well, that’s if you were on Mac, because the app was not working at all on Windows! If you’ve tried and encountered an issue, it was not your fault, but mine. My apologies!

Thank you to everyone who sent me bug reports and suggestions, I really appreciate it. It took me some time but I’ve fixed a lot of issues, so now in version 0.2.9 using the app should be a smoother experience!

I’ve also added a few quality of life features like a history when surfing your images, the ability to add images from your file explorer (Windows and Mac), and a send feedback button in case anything comes up :)

Here is the full release on Github if you want to read more!

Thank you for your patience!

My first time drawing with Promarkers :D

This week a friend gifted me a new tool to make art with!

If you don’t know, Promarker is a brand of alcohol-based markers, and they are super different from Posca I usally use: Promarkers have a semi-transparent ink that makes them both versatile (you can do layers and it doesn’t cover the ink) and tricky (it’s very easy to mess up!).

So I decided to give them a proper try this weekend! But there is a catch: I only have 3 colors!

Green for plants, beige for skin tone, and bright yellow for sunlight; that’s quite limited, but I think this is to my advantage here. No time to overthink!

After a few doodles, I decided to go back to the pictures I took in Japan as a first “real” test.

Creating variation with the markers was super challenging but I like what I was able to do:

However, I quickly discovered a big flaw in my equipment: the ink bleeds through the page!

I have a very, very cheap sketchbook that I paid around 4€ for. It does hold up surprisingly well, and the ink doesn’t bleed too far, but I need to be careful!

This weekend I also went to a drawing meeting in a café, the same one I told you about a few weeks ago! There I tried and struggled to draw human characters for a good hour, so I needed a break: drawing this mech made me feel better 🙂‍↕️ And I had the tools to add some colors!

This one was from a reference, to be clear. I wish I could come up with that kinds of design :)

Overall, I really enjoyed using those markers: very different from what I’m used to, but familiar enough that I was able to have fun with different textures and patterns!

Now some illustration progress!

Last time I shared with you the sketch of my next redraw of my Inktober project! This time we are going to the aquarium, which I’ve never drawn properly before.

After settling on the first sketch, my next step was to… make another sketch. A more detailed one for me to look back at references and cement the details before doing the ink :)

Here is what it looks like!

I was about to dive into the ink right after, but instead I was drawn to plan my colors: you see, the atmosphere needs to be on point if I want to make it look like an aquarium, so extra prep-time will not be wasted.

And indeed, the first version I did was waaay too blue -- because you know, water and all. But actually if you look at aquarium pictures there is way more variety going on.

Sure there is a lot of blue shades, but it also goes through teal, green, with even some hint of yellow and red. Keeping some variety in the colors is what makes an illustration interesting to look at!

Some of the evolution of the colors :) A bit subtle, but I can feel the difference!

Now that my color tests are done, I can get back to inking! I haven’t had time to finish it yet, so maybe next week!

Flying fishes

This week I bought a watercolor painting from my friend Ola! She made a series of fishes flying in the sky, and I really wanted to share it with you :)