I just started working on my first video game (a tutorial), which is exciting! The game itself is not exciting. The player controls a UFO and moves around the board picking up what appear to be gold chunks, which is made less exciting by the fact that they're arranged in a diamond around the board. That's the whole game. When I first started the tutorial, I was rather underwhelmed by what I was going to produce, but then I remembered that even something so simple would require a lot of code, and this is my first video game. It's not meant to be exciting, it's meant to teach me how to build a game. On a seemingly unrelated topic, I finished an art piece today. It made me realize something. One my first art projects that truly made me proud was a picture I made that was 99 percent based on Photoshop knowledge and 1 percent based on my ability to draw. At the time of writing, my portfolio still contains this: At the time I made it, I thought it was the coolest art I'd ever created. At the time I made it, that was probably true. I was so proud of it that I made it my phone's lock screen and showed it almost aggressively to anyone who was willing to look. Not long after, I had some free time and decided to make another. I actually finished it, but then a bunch of the edits didn't save (I have now learned to always make backup copies). Flash forward a few months to today, when I needed art for my blog and decided to finish the half-done piece. The result was this: I'm proud of this one, too. Then I looked at my old cloud monster, and my first thought was, "Wow, that's actually pretty terrible." There's no doubt in my mind that I've improved. And I do like the cartoonish style of my first drawing, but I think this one is just better. I've realized that, much like the simple game tutorial I'm working on in class, early work doesn't look great in hindsight because compared to what you're about to produce at the present, it often isn't that great. If it looks just as good as it did at the time you made it, you haven't improved. A lot of early work, whether it's art, code, or otherwise, isn't about whether or not it's good. It's about figuring things out and learning how to actually produce the work. Don't feel bad when you look at art (or any work) from your past, and it's not as good as you remembered. It's good for what you could do at the time, and that's really what matters. Of course, I realize my new drawing isn't perfect, but it's better. The limbs look more like limbs than last time, but they could look more like limbs. Someday I will master the art of making octopus limbs look realistic! They way I blended them into the body is a little awkward, but at least I blended them in (and I know what I did wrong). They could definitely use shading, which I considered doing but didn't have the time for, but the way I layered them at least gives some appearance of shadow. Those two blue things on the left are supposed to be comets, and they could look a little more like comets, but at least I figured out how to make them at all. Those were actually part of the original version of this piece before my edits got deleted, so I might be able to make better comets now. Of course, that galaxy in the bottom right corner doesn't look great on top of the nebula background, but this piece is really just an experiment of making space-related things, so it's not going anywhere. Going back to my point about making better comets, I might edit this piece again. I know how to improve it, and in the future I'll probably know how to improve it further. Of course, I'm still proud of my first cloud monster artwork, because that was the pioneer. It might not be as good as this new one, but it was a step in the right direction. Besides, I still think it's pretty cool. So, to summarize:
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AuthorI'm moving on to my 4th (and final) year as a Game Art & Design student at Durham School of the Arts. I'd like to call myself an artist, but I'm a programmer at heart. Archives
February 2020
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