Welcome back Reader!

This is the very last issue of the Newsletter Club of the year :)

I hope you got to enjoy the Christmas season, we are now back, and I have a lot art for you today! From the book, more traditional painting, and a birthday of a very old project nobody (except two of you) have heard of.

Some changes will also come next year for the newsletter, so grab a warm drink and let's get started ☕

Vacation Succeeded 👍

When packing to join my family for the holidays, I was full of hope I could get some progress on the book done, and I brought my laptop and my drawing tablet on the plane.

What a fool I was.

I actually barely even open my laptop during the week I was there.

Now, it isn't actually bad: I had a very great time with my family, and I definitely needed some rest. And I did other very interesting things, as I'll talk about in a minute!

But for now, since I came back home, I've finished 2 new inked illustrations. Behind pace but on the bright side, they were the most complex remaining illustrations!

We have 3 more to finish, but those are fairly simple in comparison (they don't even include roofs or antennas, if you can believe it), so I'm fairly optimistic and happy to see the finish line!

Those are really not the best in my opinion, I definitely felt rusty when coming back to digital.

BUT bear with me for a second, as I want to talk about a big, unrelated achievement that will be quickly become relevant :)

I've been learning Polish for some times now, and after a lot of meandering and trial and error I've finally been able to use reading to learn more efficiently. That's something I can confidently recommend if you're also learning a language.

And turns out, this week, right before the end of the year I have finished my first novel in Polish! (1)

I have read through the Little Prince, a book I had previously read in French when I was way too young to understand anything (even children books)

If I'm sharing this with you not only because it made me very proud, but also to give you a quote that was the right answer to my art struggle:

After the Little Prince had a laugh at the aviator's sketches, and as he found that unfair, the prince reassures him:

This and the poetic nature of the book made me feel better about this rough art time. Now I can just focus on those last stretches :)

(1) Reading and reviewing my Polish was actually what took up my free time on the plane and during the Holidays!

(2) I had to look up the quote in English as I've never owned a English version of this book

Making Homemade decoration for Christmas 🎄

This year, my brother decided to make himself a ton of decoration for Christmas, using a ton of materials that he accumulated over the years; which is an idea I found very wholesome!

So I joined in, first with something I was already familiar with and that I enjoyed last time: painting on small canvases!

I'm especially happy with the snow scene: while doing it, I could feel I had a better understanding of acrylics, dosing of water and balancing colors while taking the chaos of real life paint into account...

I'm far from being really good at it, of course, but traditional has come from something I couldn't approach to an activity I look forward to. Pretty big win for this year!

But there is more, as I've also customized a mini bird house by the same occasion!

This was really really fun to do: improvising little details with whatever I could find in the pile of materials was a blast, and painting a physical object is a very different feeling!

It felt a bit like painting a Warhammer figurine, but way less taxing and unforgiving (those things are hard to make right if you haven't tried).

Those little decoration projects, and others I did that were not as good, were a perfect break from my digital art. I'm really grateful for it!

That time when I built a Virtual Fridge and let people draw on it

Today I want to celebrate an obscure project who this December is celebrating it's 5th birthday!

Back in 2020, I had a small Discord server with friends and folks where I would share what I was working on. After helping a friend code a login system I went down a rabbit hole of building an entirely unique community website.

The site was called "Punk Queen", and it involved people joining a hastily put together community. There are a lot of details I could talk about (there were multiple locations, thousands of items, including instruments you could play at the bar, a chair stacking contest...), but there is something specific I really wanted to share with you!

In the kitchen of the bar, you could find a fridge and interact with it. But instead of pulling something from it, the players were presented with a very crude interactive whiteboard:

The players could draw something, and have their art put on the fridge! Any player entering the kitchen would see it.

And this is the reason why I'm bringing this project, is because years after pulling the plug on this website, I actually found the art made by me and the players!

It was such a joy to find this lost part of an intimate community that lasted just a few months 😊 And for you, it gives you an idea of where I'm coming from: making experiments, building things, sometimes interesting and sometime not... and for a long time now.

And the idea of building a similar, maybe less cryptic, community website is something that I would love to do for this Newsletter Club; or maybe smaller scale experiments from time to time. After all, building websites has since become my job.

Nothing in project for now, that's for sure; I have a lot on my plate, but if in the coming years I'm releasing a spiritual successor you'll know where it comes from!

That's it for this year! 🔅

Thank you so much once again for following this Newsletter Club and my art journey :)

I wish you all the best for this coming year, may it be peaceful and filled with whatever makes you happy 🩷

I'm taking the opportunity to say that next year I'm moving the Newsletter publication from Sunday evening to Tuesday morning! (European time)

I'll still be writing it at the same time, but a delayed publication would make it more consistent for you and would be less stressful for me. Let's try and see how it goes!

See you on January 7th, and in the meantime,

Take care,
- Nighten