4 posts tagged “art”
I have a lot to be thankful for today. Even though my last job left me feeling terrible, the fact I've got such caring people in my life never ceases to amaze me.I swear, at times you all think miles better of me than I do. I've got a lot to live up to. Whew!
I did about a month's worth of travel around Japan. I've been working on a graphic novel I've always wanted to do. Random freelance work has kept me afloat for the time being.
I'm not used to seasons in Japan. The part of America I used to live in didn't have them at all. It's cold...Time to make some tea!
I might have to move. There are some promising leads in Osaka. Osaka is dangerous to me; there's delicious food all over the place. I'll have to run everywhere to stay slim. Moving is always expensive and a pain in the rear, but wow. Osaka! I have some former co-workers I got along with living there. I was tempted to move to Osaka while still at Ubisoft Nagoya because the team I worked with was there and the people were friendlier. The Nagoyans were plenty nice but mighty reserved. And they really had a solid clique formed and I never got in.
Ah well. I've made new friends through Pixiv, gotten rather addicted to Sound Horizon and improved my digital painting skills by leaps and bounds. Life isn't completely rosy, but it's not terrible either.
A friend of mine recently graduated from a college local to her with a degree in Graphic Design. One portfolio comment she got from a prospective employer was that her art was too "safe." I wasn't sure what that meant at first, but having been busting my behind for my game's art, I found myself falling into some "safe" conventions.
Take a blue ball I have done for my game.
The left is the first draft. A typical blue->water->wave association. Not really daring in any way whatsoever. Save the fact that the quality of the newer blue ball is simply vastly superior, It still has a bit of watery influence, now that I think of it, the use of a swirly theme is probably how a designer came up with the Ocean Spray cranberry growers logo. Rather than think of water in a basic, 2D way, I came up with the new design by thinking about full on 3D space.
It's like always using red to do a design about fire instead of say, blue. Most fires you see burning are red all right, actually no, really red fires are very rare! Most are a nice orange/yellow with a slightly blue portion to it. Red for fire uses a fail-safe human association, rather than using the actual colors the burning gas shapes are commonly seen in.
Go on, defy some conventions. Or adhere to them in a way that no one expects you to.
Namely, the power of really simple techniques in sprite art. I've been trying my hand at doing sprites and going over board on selective outlining, manual anti-aliasing and just making a muddy mess. Guilty Gear does very little of this. It's a formula I can follow, as long as I draw decent frames to base the technique off of. Fan artist Prophetic Dream does a nice job of using GG's techniques in a small scale.
Of all the sprite art tutorials I've found, this has been my favorite, highly technical one. It's wordy, in Japanese but the illustrations say more than a thousand words.
Dot E Kouza
The first 10 Step list covers a lot of important aspects from smoothly translating freehand curves to pixels(Step 3) to calculating pallets based on 8-bit RGB values(Step 7, with more than just grays calculated here.) Pallet construction has been giving me the most grief so far. Just because 2 colors look different enough zoomed in at 500%+ doesn't mean they'll be differentiable at actual size.
Back to the drawing board.
I have some starts on a few handy skills that I started developing before my design career.
I've got an engineering background that's pretty scattered. Being a math major, doing functions that spit out some insane computation of what you put into it. I also did fairly well at Open GL. My C class thoroughly defeated me. Way to introduce pointers and not say a lick about data structures. I was so incredibly intimidated by programming after that ordeal and now every programmer I talk to says pointers are bloody negligible these days.
I'm looking into learning C#.
After a recent bite from the illustration bug, I know I have a lot of room for improvement but I feel like I have a pretty good start. I haven't done anything with Adobe Illustrator which seems to be the master sprite-creating program du jour(yay scaling vectors!)
I also want to learn a 3D modeling package, although my main motivation is not game-related. Any recommendations on a particular program that's approachable?
Suggestions and comments appreciated!
Also, it it just me or do Agavero Tequila Liqueur bottles look like the perfect fantasy Potion bottle ever?
