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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Hey there Reader! :)
I hope all is good for you this week!
On my side, I’m super happy to be back to share more art with you this week, but I also have a very silly project that made me laugh a lot.
You’ll see what I mean, but it’s directly tied to this newsletter!
A lot of shades of green
Last week, I shared my first progress on my next illustration, based on a Japanese garden I visited back when I was in Japan last summer. I had about ~70% of the ink done back then, and bit by bit, I was able to complete it before the weekend.
It’s so unreal to look at it up close: without any colors, it’s super hard to parse and make sense of, but zooming out makes the patterns clearer, and it finally looks like an image. Quite trippy! But also very satisfying to dive into my work like this.
I was then able to move on to the colors, first by defining basic shapes and then refining from there. It’s especially important at this stage because:
I have a whole bunch of plants that will need to have distinct colors each (so I want to make sure each has its own layer).
And because I drew some of the textures so loosely, I have almost no closed shapes. I can’t use bucket tools to make my life easier unless I first go over and manually trace the shapes.
I was drawing in a coffee shop!
Well, that was tedious, but like anything else, focusing on doing one step (or line) at a time got me somewhere :)
More progress at home 👍
Now I have a pretty good base, and I need to adjust values and remaining mistakes before I can safely move on to the lighting and refining—the final steps! I hope to get there this week; we’ll see together next Tuesday how it went!
Replacing myself with (not really) AI 🤖
As you might know, on top of art, I also code for a living; and there was a project I really wanted to try my hand on: a text generator!
You see, there is this technique for text generation that fascinated me as a kid. It’s called a Markov chain, and it’s extremely simple:
It first analyzes a text and builds statistics that just boil down to “what are the pairs of words in this text file?”, I then do the following:
Pick a random word.
Pick a random word that can come after.
Continue until I reach a period.
And at the end, I have a sentence!
But what’s the link with this newsletter? Well, I simply downloaded the entirety of the newsletter archive in text format, processed it, and I now have a script that can create new sentences for my newsletter.
Have a look!
As you can see, it has the shape of a sentence, it has words that exist, but this is complete nonsense. And that’s why I like it :)
Many thing were still lacking was long time
When I was a kid, I loved to go to a website that implemented this algorithm based on books; and I would just get new sentences to read! This creates a very weird poetry, where you can sometimes see glimpses of meaning, but at its core, it’s just statistics and your imagination filling the gaps...
:)
How much does it sound like me in your opinion? 😄
If you’re curious about how to build something like this and you read code, Pixalisk on Mastodon made his own version based on Wikipedia articles! Not exactly what I did, but his code is much cleaner than mine!
I do very much enjoy hot chocolate
To finish off this fun and silly weekend project, I also made a bot! :)
You can follow the account “Nighten Having a Stroke” on the fediverse (Mastodon and others) if you have an account there, and enjoy the absurd as much as I do:
(just copy and paste the handle in the search bar and you should be able to find it)
Should I simplify my art?
Speaking of Masto, this week I wanted to ask this question to gather some feedback:
Not that I was seriously considering sacrificing quality for the sake of posting more on social; but I also realize that making art takes me so long that it’s frustrating both for me and maybe also for you. That’s at least what I wanted to learn about!
But TLDR, when it comes to my art I’m not changing my process, but I’ll make sure to document and share more of the process with you guys!
Random links of the week:
If you’re considering visiting Japan this year or soon after, I’ve made a quick collection of tips I had to learn before and during my trip last summer. I made this for friends at first, but I thought this could help :) Feel free to comment to ask or suggest anything!
I also shared my raw thoughts on the internet and why it’s so hard to find current content and discussion without relying on algorithms. If you like to think about the web, this might be an interesting read!
Thank you for reading ! As I said at the beginning, I'm gonna pick a random subscriber will be selected at this date; and this person will be able to choose any artwork that I have in stock to call theirs. I offer shipping and everything!
So once again make sure to watch your inbox :)
Take care, - Nighten
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