Programmer becoming an Artist [Advice]
I can program, I'd say pretty well :-P but I'd really like to be able to make my own art. Question is do I start practicing pencil and paper or should I just start straight onto digital? Plus are there any good resources/tools anyone can suggest. There are so many opinions and I'd like some from the game devs. Oh, and I'm not a the stickman level, a bit higher. Thanks :-)
Comments
1) What games do you want to make. Do you want to work on pixel art games? Do you want to do 3d? Do you want to do concepts? Animation? What do you want to do. You'll need to specialise. But just remember that which ever direction you go, being able to draw well, having a good grasp on your fundamentals is SUPER important. Shape, form, perspective, light and colour, etc.
Game art is something that goes ONTOP of good fundamentals. If you just start straight with bogging yourself down with technical stuff and your fundamentals are wrong, you are going to make ugly art, and you are going to be sad when your game doesnt "read".
2) Draw every day, draw for the sake of drawing, don't just sit around and wait for inspiration. Set yourself goals. Don't just draw to improve drawing, draw to improve something you are bad with (draw to understand stuff). This isn't a traditional or digital question. Use whatever medium you get your hands on, IT DOESN'T fucking matter what it is. Whether you are drawing with a pencil, or a digital tablet, or a stick in the mud. The fundamentals are always the same.
3) Start being observant. And start looking at A LOT of pictures (Buy comics, art books, graphic novels, LOOK AT PINTEREST ITS NOT ONLY FOR GIRLS). Your brain is a huge library, LITERALLY. The more stuff you observe and draw, the more informed you will be the next time you draw something like that. Look how colours get affected by light. You'll need to start being very observant about your surroundings. Look at the trees outside. What colour is the ambient light outside. How does that ambient light affect the colour of the shadows in the trees, how does it affect the colour of the midtones and the highlights ? Are there any highlights ? Is it overcast? How does it being overcast affect the lighting on the trees, etc. Carry a sketchbook.
4) NEVER STOP DRAWING. Copy famous artists. Copy life. Draw from your head.
5) Some places to start.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOzPkdDPBOrEKyUrRSCZv0A
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClM2LuQ1q5WEc23462tQzBg
https://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL
6) Think about what Elyaradine said in his post, about art goggles. You need to step the fuck away from your work. Its going to be shit. Trust me. Its not good enough. The sooner you see that (doesnt matter your skill level), the sooner you can start asking yourself, whats wrong with it, why is it wrong, and how do I fix it. If you are too lazy to fix it then keep it in mind the next time you do something similar. And take critism. It doesnt matter if the person is worse than you. They have been staring at your shit picture for way less time than you, and can see the things that big them much faster than you.
6b) get your mom to tell you you are awesome. You'll need some reassuring.
7) http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm
http://artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/
8) Buy yourself a shit tablet (like R400) from a computer shop. Use photoshop. But also use pencil and paper.
9) ART IS LIKE GYM. ITS NOT SOME MAGICAL TALENT. YOU BENCH, YOU IMPROVE. YOU SKIP LEG DAY. YOU LOOK LIKE A FUCKING IDIOT.
10) Get going!
11) Reference
http://www.pinterest.com/lusta/
http://www.pinterest.com/characterdesigh/
12) Buy Colour and Light by James Gurney
(PS : sorry if this doesn't make sense I don't have time to proof read) GOOD LUCK! Also if you have any questions please ask away. And all of this applies to pixel art too, don't think jst because pixel art is so small and restrictive that you need to know less about art fundamentals. :)
And when you say tablet, I've got an iPad or do you mean like those drawing tablets?
I'm not familiar with painting on iPad. Philipe is telling me you can get some painting apps for it though (Will have to do some research). Tablets (Genius, wacom)
Read, Animators Survival kit, Richard Williams.
My advice is to not worry about tools. You can just animate in photoshop. The more tools you introduce into your pipeline the more room there is to make mistakes. Also look at TV Paint or Toon boom and Flash.
Good luck!
The tablet @bevis is talking about is something like this, although you can get much cheaper ones. It's a bit crazy how expensive the lower range Wacoms have become. :/
Some of the most beautiful and best art things I've ever seen are NOT drawn or painted - programmatic art can really make some amazing things. Off-hand I can't really think of much, but these are good starts:
http://www.levitated.net/daily/index.html - this guy used to be my inspiration for learning Flash - he made these little Flash computational art things which looked and moved amazingly.
http://www.complexification.net/gallery/ - just gogogled it and looks really amazing
Among others. So what I'm saying is don't restrict your thinking to "I must be able to draw amazing" when talking about art - if you want to, great, practice it - but there are other ways to art, and if you want to persue those you can start by improving your eye for what's beautiful and what works and doesn't work. In short, art direction. Programming is also an ability to arrange things to look a certain way, just like pencil, 3D, painting, etc. Hone it :)
A great many beautiful games were made without so-called traditional art :) Examples include...
Faraway:
There was that comet game Evan linked but I can't find it or remember its name. And for some reason I'm drawing a blank right now, but there are quite a few games that aren't "traditionally arted" :)
Dyad I think is a better example.
<3 peace
It's like me saying I'm going to go look at other peoples code so I can become a programmer....
My problem is I don't know "what" to draw that's at my skill level?
I'm just saying people can express art through mediums other than the ability to draw. Did any of you click on the links I linked? levitated.net? Do you think any of those bits were made with traditional art knowledge? I don't think so.
So again, I'm saying look at examples, learn, do things other people have one before you. But don't be limited to "art = drawing skill" because that is not it. It will help, but it's not THE BE ALL AND END ALL.
Explore! Find things that resonate with you!
So yes, play around, explore and dream, but if you want to learn how to make art then go and learn that.
@Fengol - sadly even that talent thing doesnt get you too far
But yes. No matter how you want to approach it, with pencil/painting, computational, animation, whatever, you need to PRACTICE. Practice the thing that you want to get good at. Copy. Steal. Copy some more. That's how you learn. Learn the crap out of it!
I bring this up again cos it's good :)
http://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginners
Regarding "Learn the fundamentals VS focus on the skills you need", I think it really depends on how comprehensive and deep you want your artistic skillset to be.
And also how good your artistic intuition is already. I think if you come from a graphic design background like @Tuism you would have already picked up good fundamentals outside of traditional routes. If you come from a mostly programming background then learning fundamentals like colour theory first could accelerate your growth as an artist.
Now that I think about it... I wish I understood colour theory better (and fundamentals like that), even though I mostly program these days.
Totally agree with practicing like fuck at the art. Draw/Sculp/FingerPaint/PixelArt as much as you can.
Speaking of picking colours from Picasso... I wonder if the guy who made Proun had an art background or was just managing to look like it by aping Kandinsky's work:
Us Arty types got where we are from doing, and it's something tricky to learn, as we made more and more mistakes as time past we learnt what works and what doesn't by trial and error.
But if you want some quick advice: go look at the visual literacy usually taught through Graphics design. it's simple stuff to know but pretty tricky to get into your own practice naturally. Game art is all about communication and the rules for communicating come from these elements of design; Colour, line, balance, contrast etc... and graphics design follows those rules and should make more sense to someone who hasn't been thinking in art all their life.
This is assumptious, and if offensive, I apologize. But I hope that thought helped :)
I'm not an amazing artist, in fact I tend to be incredibly abstract in the things I do art when I art at all, but I'm a much better communicator around art thanks to those courses.
Practice equals talent.
And even a little bit of art/visual understanding is going to make even minimal prototypes much easier to market and more fun to develop. And a little bit of visual understanding is going to make it easier to communicate with artist teammembers (assuming the games you want to make require artists).
I just wanted to give a quick insert about procedural art, and the dangers of using it as an expressive medium. In many ways, it can (but need not and should not) be like drawing from your head (as a beginner), in that you make lazy choices instead of correct ones. Because you do not have something to check it against, you don't push yourself, and hence it's easy to make stuff that is ugly, boring, or suboptimal. This is because a lot of procedural art is kind-of-experimental, which in itself is not bad - but it's like doodling instead of drawing. Powerful procedural art is really encoding visual principles, and that is difficult (because you need both art and math understanding). I would hazard to say without doing some traditional "training", your procedures will always be inferior.
((Of course, procedural art (and other things) is incredibly fun to create, and one of the best ways to add some obscure math to your programming toolbox too! So to be clear, I am not advising against using it as en expressive medium; just saying to get the art side down, other ways are probably better))
That said, a solid artistic foundation or understanding is going to help you situate your procedural art in smart and effective ways - I made an observation that space ships in 2D could simply be seen as a series of triangles extruded out of a basic polygon and that gave rise to a whole game eventually... It didn't look that great in the end, but the changes I'd make now to clean it up have nothing to do with the procedural part of things and everything to do with colour balance and coherence.