Upgrading My Art
A recent understanding I've come to following my down time and reflection is that my art skills need improving just as much as my coding and musical skills. While I've known for some time that my art skills are mediocre at best, and that I normally try to compensate for this by using pixel art, I now think that I really should try to focus on improving this skill for it to be able to partner with any growth in my capabilities for making games.
This realisation came about partly from a recent game idea had that I then realised I felt I could not actually make a reality, not because I cannot draw, but because I cannot draw well enough to feel confident in the result.
Not wanting to really stop, or continue to hold myself back, I did the thing that so often becomes the source of distraction and procrastination, I turned to YouTube, looking for that one tutorial that might help me figure out where to start or how to go about improving my art.
By pure chance I came across the channel OriDays, and their content not only resonated with me, but also gave the kind of advice that I already know and should be common sense, but was forgotten about when I started thinking about how to improve my art. The big tip, and a point that is repeated throughout their content is ... you need to put the work in, and that is mostly it. No special tricks, no focus on succeeding by following them, watching speed draws or specific techniques, just put the work in, in the right way, and if you do enough, eventually you will see improvement.
OriDays does generally aim to give advice about how to approach some of the common pitfalls of learning to be an artist, they have created a course for people to follow, they have a fairly strong following, they focus on anime style art (which I like), and they plan on shaping themself as a VTuber of sorts; but the key difference in their content is the overriding message that you need to put the work in. If you don't you'll never really improve, and there is really no trick that make someone go from being a novice artist to a skilled one, just time and effort.
OriDays Channel Link - https://www.youtube.com/@oridays
This approach of "putting the work in" is an approach I have already been applying over the last few years with both game development and with making music, so you can imagine how I felt when I asked myself why I hadn't done it with my art yet. I felt dumb and would have kicked myself if I wasn't so struck by the realisation that I should have already thought of this.
So after watching a few videos by OriDays about their own experiences and the lessons they learned along the way, I considered how I would get started with actually trying to put the work into my art. I realised that my current setup for drawing digitally wasn't entirely comfortable, so then decided to change it and invest in a tablet that comes with a drawing pen. This has made drawing feel so much more comfortable, and I'm now able to just pick up my tablet and start drawing at almost any time. I've also decided what I need to work on to improve, my most common pitfall is drawing the human body, whether that is trying to provide a normally proportioned image, or a stylised one. This, I feel at least is because I never quite get the proportions right. Proportions and perspective, when not done right, mean that any image I crate will never quite seem to fit together. Without improvement, my art will never be able to progress beyond mediocre and I will never have the confidence I need in my own abilities to be able to apply my art to my game projects.
To help with this, I will be doing exercises to try and improve these critical aspects of my art, and over time, as those practiced techniques become natural, I hope to be able to produce images of a reasonable quality that I could then use too improve the visuals of my games. As my art improves, I am also currently hoping that it will likewise also improve my 3D modelling, allowing me to more easily produce assets for my games. While 3D modelling is a completely different skill, if I'm getting the proportions wring when drawing, I will never be able to produce a well proportioned 3D model.
As a start on this new focus, I have initially created new headers for my blog, and also tried an exercise on drawing anime styled eyes. The exercise on the eyes also turned into an experiment on drawing an anime styled head around a set of eyes to see where I'm at now. These examples are below.
Blog Headers
The idea behind creating these new headers is so that I can more easily differentiate any future blog posts I intend to make. As a part of this, I have also gone with a neutral blog theme that will allow the new headers to stand out, but not look out of place, where my old theme was strongly coloured based on my own logo. I still have a couple of headers to make but I think they've come out OK.
Exercise and Experiment
The first exercise I've done on trying to improve has been to look at anime styled eyes, the proportions and how they're constructed. On doing a little research, I found out that when looking at the front, the eyes are normally positioned with a one eye width gap separating the eyes. This was new to me and formed the basis of setting up my exercise. First I created a series of wide boxes, then split them into three roughly equal parts. This would form the guideline space I would work in for drawing the sets of eyes. To start myself off, I used mirroring centred on half the width of the large box to see if what I could draw looked like it made sense.
One of the resulting practice sets is below.
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