Bonjour!

Welcome to this third issue of the Newsletter Club! I sincerely hope you're doing great Reader, and enjoying the early fall 🍂

Today we have a lot to cover: I started working on my book project, I dealt with writing problems and I started filming my art process!
Let's go through these together.

The book has started!

As I said last week, I decided that my project for the coming months will be a small illustrated book!

In short, it's about a little girl named Susie who explores a big city to survey people about their job for a school project; until she finds someone with a very special one!

This month, since Inktober is going on, I decided that I will sketch all the illustrations before getting to the writing this month. Since October has 31 days, it means that I roughly need to produce a new sketch every two days.

Now, that's a very big task; an illustration usually take me a dedicated week and inking is a big part of it. But I'm happy to report that thanks to the weekend I'm sticking to the schedule!

Here are the sketches of the first illustration who will appear at the beginning of the book:

If you're an OG who have been in this club since the very beginning, you know that I love self reference and building my little universe of repeated pattern; and this is no exception.

The city for example, with its Haussmannian inspired architecture and its absurd amount of wires and antennas, can be seen in many of my illustration.

When I first started to envision this city, it had a very standard New York/Metropolis and futuristic inspiration. (Transmetropolitan was one of the main influence, if you're into comics!)

But as time went on I instead started to come back to my European upbringing. And I wanted something more hopeful, a city that feels big and bustling but not a cyberpunk dystopia. The world is already gray enough.

This book is one of the many building blocks of this imaginary city.

Writing is hard!

Exactly two hours after sending my last newsletter and officially announcing the project to you guys, I was hit by something big.

I had just laid down the whole book to my girlfriend, but as I was explaining it I realize that it wasn't landing at all like I wanted.

Some part where too long, other fell flat, the stakes were way too subtle... I thought I would need a whole rewrite or push through something that isn't that good.

But thankfully, after I calmed down I was about to think through the problems, reordering some scene and putting more emphasis on others. After a few days of thinking through it (even in my sleep I talked about the story), I think I have found how to salvage this story.

There is still some gray area but at least I know that I will not have to start from scratch, and I can just do the illustrations for now.

This was very scary, but I'm used to those kinds of doubts: I just have to trust myself to figure out how to address the project’s issues now that I’m aware of them.

The opposite is why I abandoned a lot of project in the past: not trusting myself enough to handle the problem that inevitably arise.

All of that to say, it's better now! And when time will come, I will definitely share the drafts with you and ask for your feedback.

Stay tuned for that :)

This is how I draw for real

This week I also started something completely new: videos!

I’ve been making time lapse recording for a while, but it’s all sped up and doesn’t really reflect how I actually draw. So this week I invested in a little flexible tripod, stuck my phone and started filming!

And now I have two short videos for you:

First, a glimpse into how I drew the little details for the opening shot of the book; by far the most complex. It took a long time, especially for a sketch, but it was very fun to make!

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Do you want to know how I make that many details in my illustration?

I used one of the book’s illustration to make a short tutorial explaining my drawing technique.

This is a method I developed myself and never saw anyone else do, but it’s what helped me finally starting to draw landscape and full fledged illustration. Here’s the process (with some nice music)

Let me know if you like those kinds of video! For now they didn’t get a lot of traction, so if there is something you think I could improve at let me know!

(really, you can hit reply in your email program and it will go to my inbox! :D )

Before you go, here's a nice artist I discovered this week!

I discovered recently the work of Joanna Karpowicz, and especially her Anubis series.

She's a painter from Poland, and I was stunned by her colors and landscape.

You can find her work here: https://joannakarpowicz.pl/​

I just think you'll enjoy it! I want to share more art with you, and not only mine necessarily!

That's it for today! A very busy week once again, and the next one will probably be just as similar; but I'm having a lot of fun creating so much art!

Thank you for being here, and congratulation again for the lucky winner of this month print's giveaway. If it wasn't you, keep your fingers crossed for next month! :)

In the meantime, take care, and enjoy the season
- Nighten