Hi there Reader!

I hope life has been good for you recently 🌸

This week, well, for a change I haven't made a tremendous amount of progress on my illustration, but I still have interesting things to share this week! And I have some nice bonuses on top of it ;)

Please sit back and enjoy!

My not so productive week

You see, this weekend I was busy in a romantic weekend in Wroclaw, in the south-west of Poland. We even went to the zoo! Look at those fishes (:

We had a great time there, and it was nice to not spend the weekend at home for once.

But this doesn’t mean I haven’t made any progress! I made sure to set time aside to draw during the week, and thankfully I was able to complete most of the coloring this way.

The next step should be the shading/adding shadow and light, but these past few months I’ve started doing something in between: before doing it properly, I like to do a very rough version of the light to have a better idea of where I’m going. This mostly helps with adjusting the ambiance before doing a clean version of it.

I love how much some light can completely transform the mood :)

What’s fun is that my fiancée also took a stab at it and made her own version, adjusting the colors and the light. It’s interesting to see how we got two different takes on the same subject!

As you can guess, she’s also an artist, and her input is helping me tremendously to progress. I’m happy to have her!

Now I have no plan for the next weekend, so I expect to be back next Tuesday with the proper shadows done!

A new milestone for this newsletter :)

Quick meta note about this newsletter! Last week, as I sent out the previous edition, I noticed a very neat number in my dashboard: I have sent exactly 1,000 emails in the past 3 months! :D

My email software only show stats on last 90 days, but I wonder how much I sent in total

That’s pretty neat, especially when I remember just starting out and being amazed when I was sending the first few hundreds.

This newsletter is in its second year (or season 2, it’s more fun to put it this way!), and right now there are around 80 of you following my weekly art letters. I’m incredibly grateful for this, and with all my heart, a thousand thanks to all of you!

I’ll keep focusing on making better art and better letters for you to enjoy :)

If you’d like to help and share the word around, feel free to tell a friend about my work! This helps immensely.

Ok I wasn’t exactly honest about the not much progress part

Alright back on track, and I have something to admit: I couldn’t help but also draw during my weekend. I may have not taken my tablet, but I had enough space for a sketchbook :)

This time I had a special focus on characters:

I’ve talked about it many times before, but improving my characters has been a goal for me for a while.

Ironically, before doing illustration as I do now I thought characters were the only thing I could draw; but since then I’ve put all my stats in landscapes, and I haven’t drawn that many humans since. At least I didn’t show them off as much in my illustration!