Old Art | Storybook Concept - "Letters to Midnight" (Patreon)

This week my sister was clearing out an old laptop and ended up finding a bunch of my artwork from my high school and college days. I thought a lot of this was lost forever, so this was a nice surprise! I'm going to be archiving it here so we can't lose it again.

This is another book I made for a Freshman year book-making class! I spent way too much time on it. It's a little story about two rogue spies falling in love, Midnight and Centime (pronounced "sahn-TEEM").

The idea is this story is being presented as a collective set of classified documents. It starts as the raw documents for a few pages, but then the paper comes to life and actually illustrates the action. The technical work is a little clunky, but I actually think this holds up pretty well for being nearly a decade old!

We actually got this book printed at the end of class, so... very technically, this is the first I ever wrote! Neat!

This is also the project that taught me about DPI and printing resolution! If you're unaware, most things you see online are 72dpi (dots-per-inch). It basically counts the amount of pixels per a single square inch of an illustration. The higher the DPI, the more pixels make up an image. If you've ever seen those high-res images of space from NASA, those are an INSANE amount of DPI. Sometimes several thousand. Most print media is at least 300dpi.

I did not know that when I started, so I ended up drawing the first 15-20 pages of this at a microscopic, blurry resolution before my teacher taught me that wasn't acceptable.

Unfortunately, I'd already drawn too much of the book by that point to go back and fix it. You can see me editing some of the shapes to re-crisp their edges... but there's a lot of spots where the blurs are pretty noticeable. C'est la vie!"