Hi Reader 🌸

This week for a change we don't have a ton of things to go over; I've been busy but just like usual, so this week's issue is gonna be more laid back. I hope you're having a great weekend!

Today we gonna go over the progress on my illustrated book, and I want to show you a little bit of how I first developed my style, 19 months ago.

The book is progressing at a good pace✨

I haven't talked about it a lot on Mastodon or anywhere else, so to give you a heads up if you just arrived: I'm making a small illustrated book to learn about what goes into doing it, and to put my art into more concrete projects.

The book is about Susie, a young girl living in a big city, who needs to survey people about their job for a school project, while wondering herself what she would want to do when she grows up.

Now that you're all caught up, here's the 3 sketches I did this week!

So, how are we going so far?

13 days into October and we have six illustrations, so a bit less than two per day. I'm quite happy about the rhythm so far!

And during my rewrite of the story I cut one planned illustration; which brings the total we are aiming for to 13 sketches. We should be able to hit the goal this month! Which is a huge relief.

I would love to have this book ready before Christmas, but considering the amount of details I need to ink and color, plus the writing and book formatting, it might be short for you all to receive it by Christmas eve.

So no promises for now! I'm just gonna focus on making something great for you to look at.

Back to the progress: and in case you haven't seen last week's newsletter, here is the whole set of completed sketches:

I'm gonna continue to post the other half of the book as it gets finished.

Although, I was afraid that it might be spoiling you the first read; but I think I prefer you to see the whole process, enjoy the art and maybe give me some early feedback! :)

Throwback: how I created my own style

Like I talked about before, Susie and the world surrounding her is not entirely new to me; for example last year I did an illustration of her and her big sister, Deborah.

But it got me thinking about a small comic I did about them, back in March of last year.

Today I wanted to share it with you because it's actually with this comics that I create and further developed my unique style!

I wanted to try making comics for a while, and this was my first real attempt at doing so.

I knew it would be a big task, so I decided to cut corner when it comes to the art style. Back in the day I was spending a lot of time inking as I struggled to get the right line I wanted, so for this project only I decided to not worry about brush size at all.

But it actually grew on me, and now I really only use this process when drawing digitally! After some refinement this weird constraint became my style.

I know there is a few artist that are part of the club, and I think there is a lot of implication if you're trying to find your style:

An unique style can be born from constraint, arbitrary rules; but good style needs more than that.

You can make up a lot of constraints (let's use only the square tool and shades of purple, and only draw on round canvases), but this doesn't at all makes your art automatically great or interesting.

It was really hard for me to draw this way at the beginning, but I liked the challenge and all the problems that I had to solve (how to create depth without pen pressure? how to create texture? how to make it still look interesting?).

And this challenge made me a better artist overall.

This comes back to the fundamentals and the subject matter. Which is why it's just as important to be well rounded than to focus on finding this uniqueness in you.

That's how I view it at least! I could talk forever about this subject.

So! Enough talking for now.

Feel free to read this very short comic! It's very weird to be honest but I'm sure you had no idea I did something like this.

That's it for today, thank you for reading! I really appreciate you sticking around and getting to know me better, even if I tend to ramble a lot.

Next week you can expect more progress on the book! I'm excited to see you there :D

In the meantime, take care!!
- Nighten