User talk:Finticemo

TMC (talk): Oops! I'm so sorry that it took us so long to notice your plight! Users can't add URLs to the wiki until they've been added to the Not evil list by an admin, to defeat spam. I've finally added you. Thanks for that Lospec link, it's simply amazing!

Finticemo : NP, TMC. I didn't remember the 'not evil' list, but I wasn't particularly fussed since I also wanted to rewrite my old advice for learning pixel art, which is seriously lacking in structure and prioritization. Still working on that.

New 'argument for drawing' aiming to justify the recommendation to learn to draw made by James

When you set out to make pixel art, it's in part a pragmatic thing; your game needs certain artwork. At OHR resolutions, pixel art is the obvious choice, and for really small things like tiles or fonts, it becomes the only option. Pixel art certainly has advantages over traditional art, for example everything is extremely discrete, and it's safe to revise infinitely, so it's possible to make something that looks good even when your hand is shaky and you don't exactly know what you're doing.

So why add the task of learning to draw to that? Here are a few questions that illustrate the problem of working with pixel art only

• How can you develop your artistic taste? (by taste I mean: a sense of what is ugly and what is beautiful, what elements contribute the most to beauty and what elements contribute least)
• How can you produce art with a consistent feel? (for example, simply making all sprites of a character feel just like that character, rather than some sprites feeling like a distortion or caricature of them)
  • How can you produce scenes in which there is no sense of incongruity -- the characters, the tiles, and any other elements feel like they come together on the screen and form one coherent thing?
• What can be done to work with art more intuitively, spend less time fighting with it?

Pixel art is an extremely reductive art form. Consider it like assembling individual molecules to create a clay sculpture, as opposed to taking a block of clay and carving out sections, adding and removing blobs, working at whatever scale is needed. It is not that you cannot work approximately with pixel art, it's simply that, even if you use a big 10 pixel brush, you never get to forget about the individual pixel. Each individual pixel visibly detracts if it is not placed correctly. You might be tempted to shuffle one little area 100 times, just to see if you can make it more 'right'.

The media itself resists big-picture thinking. In my view, the process of constructing a picture is one of thinking -- thinking in non verbal or at very least abstract terms. The current state of the picture reflects the history of all the thoughts you have acted on while making it.

Now if you agree with that at least provisionally, you might notice that 'all the thoughts you have acted on' isn't the same thing as the usual conception of history, 'all of the actions you took'. Actions are always concrete things, and often very discrete -- you can break them down into a mechanical procedure - "to make a rounded box, you use the rectangle tool, then you remove the 3 pixels closest to each corner". That's easy to understand and repeat, which is why it's useful, but it's not enough. There's the bigger question of intent.

Are you aiming at carrying out a series of procedures, or at creating some kind of whole thing that conveys a certain impression?

You might say 'well, kind of both. I put in the shape of the torso, and then I attach the head, the legs and arms; and they are lines or blocks or spheres, that's how I do that. I keep adding things on.'. That's probably a fair characterization of what many people do. It's not wrong. But it could be more effective and practical. It could even be easier to think about.

What is the space your figure sits inside of? How is it positioned within that space, how does it twist, where is the push and pull as you go along a leg, up the torso, along the arm?

Can you record all that in 30 seconds, and get it at least roughly right? How about in 10 seconds?

(this is a real drawing exercise, described in Nicolaides' "Natural Way to Draw")

Maybe that's too challenging. Do you think you could possibly do that in pixel art - describe the entire figure, in 30 seconds -- if you had a lot of practice?.

It seems to me that it's extremely difficult to do this with pixel art, and that the precise reason why it's difficult is that in pixel art, you don't get to be that approximate. If you continually threw pixels down, using your best judgement, you would still end up with a difficult to read mess.

That's my argument for drawing -- if you want to achieve consistency, you need approximation, you need room to think visually. There's not much use for being precise unless you have already been approximate, because the conception of the picture as a whole is approximate by nature. A loose medium allows you to grow the picture continually and organically, rather than assembling pieces like lego.

Then the pixel art side becomes simple: you have a design, you worked out all the major pictorial problems, it's a solid foundation, you can translate it (in a pretty literal way) into pixel art. Maybe your pixel art technique is lacking. Doesn't matter too much, technique is 10% of visual appeal, design is 90% of visual appeal.

Links on philosophy and methods of art

Use in moderation.

• sculpting with line - An approach to building up drawings which is particularly compatible with pixel art's emphasis on the forceful interplay between chunks and stacking of chunks, while also facilitating rapid refinement of the whole drawing.

(who knows where this section will end up. Maybe just here)

WIP area / notes

Links to add

something from moatdd: a bit about painting values, how to draft basic forms intuitively

some other painting thing that's not specific to pixel art. Arne's tutorial is too big in scope.

something about composition that illustrates it applies to individual parts (eg sprites, or even parts of sprites) as well as the whole picture

Something about design principles. An emphasis on repetition and space seems like it would be particularly useful.

Something addressing the constraints of tiles, perhaps (but not specifically in a pixel art manner)

philosophical topics that help with developing pictures:

• so called 'originality' (and 'style')
• something that nails down the idea of developing the whole picture really hard.

Trying to stick to a minimal approach.

Old 'Advice for learning pixel art' text from my old account (NeoTA)

(Finticemo: I'm placing this here at least temporarily, in case parts of it need to be included in the revised text. Current text is at How_do_I_learn_to_draw_better_graphics?#Advice_from_NeoTA)

All there is in drawing are the fundamentals: there are many fundamental elements, like composition, line and form and rhythm, color, planes and value and lighting, that apply at all levels, from small parts of individual sprites, to individual sprites, to sets of sprites, to entire battle layouts or tilemaps. Flaws arise from either a flaw in your understanding of one or more basic elements, or a flaw in the way you've combined them. Similarly, an outstanding piece can be said to be one in which mistakes are relatively absent, rather than having any particular -element- be overwhelmingly good (although that is often also true). A strong tile or sprite may be made up of only a few strong elements, while a weak image is frequently a large assortment of effects which fail to pull together into a pleasing whole.

In that vein, consider beginning with the most minimalistic approach you can, and refining those simple elements, so that you are focusing on solid foundations rather than merely nice effects. Build your image thoughtfully from the ground up, resisting the temptation to polish anything until it is already basically sound.

IMO the most important point is to think like a concept artist; if you focus on communicating the concept behind what you are drawing strongly, more than anything else, it makes coming back and making improvements infinitely easier. Future you is not in the same mental state as present you; you may as well think of them as a whole separate person; so you need to include strong visual cues and as many cues as possible. You can get to subtlety later. Polish is nice, but clarity is essential.

Feng Zha has a whole YouTube video series covering the most essential elements of concept-design-oriented drawing, ie. most of the above. 99% of the material is applicable to any type of visual art including pixel art, it's extremely focused, practical, and encouraging, and he explains in a wonderfully clear way with lots of concrete examples and plenty of review of concepts. I highly recommend it -- it changed my whole view of art and helped me to put all these separate elements together into a more integrated understanding.

Note: the series linked above is designed to be watched starting from Episode 1 and building on the concepts gradually; you need to click the 'load more' button several times until there are no more videos to list, and Episode 1 can then be found near the end of the list.

For the details of specific aspects of art, I highly recommend Arne's general art tutorial.