Ad Lib- A Self Improvement Blog
Greetings to all artists, modelers, and hobbyists! I have been very intrigued with game dev for a long while and find myself playing around with programming and digital art in my spare time while studying my first year of music college. I took it upon myself (after a good deal of thought) to get a bit more serious about my clunky art skills and hope to develop them further with this studies, practices, inquiries and hopefully a bit of music blog-esque thread.
My aim of this thread is to start from the very bottom: start working on fixing my fundamentals, developing a better understanding of my tools and achieving workflow with the help of the Polycount community...cause you guys are AWESOME! I will be recompiling and organizing all the tutorials/readings/how to's i find as well.
Art Style and Approach
I've been interested in the production of artistic/atmospheric games and i'm a super big fan of non realistic, stylized, cartoonish and painterly art design. I'm also intrigued in minimalist and deceptively simple design. References, emulation, and studies will head in that direction.
My posts and uploads will relate to developing specific art concepts/fundamentals and getting feedback on them. I will also be constantly posting all my question and doubts in this thread.
Concepts and approaches I'll be working with:
-Shapes Mean Things
Making things look like things, i'm having trouble with blocking, organizing shapes, and working from the big idea to the small details so Shapes Mean Things is intended just for that. I will be exploring silhouette design heavily for this practices.
-Linework
My lines are quite messy at times and it's due to sketching improperly in paper (scratching lines instead of drawing single strokes), add a digital drawing tablet and hell breaks loose. Linework will be exactly that...line practice: figures, edges, geometry, sketches, environment objects,etc. to build consistancy.
-Swatches
Big brush, soft brush, shape dynamics, opacity, jitter, etc...wtf is all of this?! Swatches will be studies on achieve painterly dynamics with digital software brushes.
-Text me
Handpainted texture practice and game texture analysis
-Sculpt This!
Modeling, low poly, applying textures, and all of that good stuff.
I will be focusing on the first two for now, shapes and linework is sort of a hassle at the moment and wish to get better at that before moving on. Here's an example of the inconsistency i'm referring to, my first handpainted texture try. I somewhat like the shapes and colors but feel at a lost with the improper lines, they seem messy. I'd appreciate any help greatly!
My aim of this thread is to start from the very bottom: start working on fixing my fundamentals, developing a better understanding of my tools and achieving workflow with the help of the Polycount community...cause you guys are AWESOME! I will be recompiling and organizing all the tutorials/readings/how to's i find as well.
Art Style and Approach
I've been interested in the production of artistic/atmospheric games and i'm a super big fan of non realistic, stylized, cartoonish and painterly art design. I'm also intrigued in minimalist and deceptively simple design. References, emulation, and studies will head in that direction.
My posts and uploads will relate to developing specific art concepts/fundamentals and getting feedback on them. I will also be constantly posting all my question and doubts in this thread.
Concepts and approaches I'll be working with:
-Shapes Mean Things
Making things look like things, i'm having trouble with blocking, organizing shapes, and working from the big idea to the small details so Shapes Mean Things is intended just for that. I will be exploring silhouette design heavily for this practices.
-Linework
My lines are quite messy at times and it's due to sketching improperly in paper (scratching lines instead of drawing single strokes), add a digital drawing tablet and hell breaks loose. Linework will be exactly that...line practice: figures, edges, geometry, sketches, environment objects,etc. to build consistancy.
-Swatches
Big brush, soft brush, shape dynamics, opacity, jitter, etc...wtf is all of this?! Swatches will be studies on achieve painterly dynamics with digital software brushes.
-Text me
Handpainted texture practice and game texture analysis
-Sculpt This!
Modeling, low poly, applying textures, and all of that good stuff.
I will be focusing on the first two for now, shapes and linework is sort of a hassle at the moment and wish to get better at that before moving on. Here's an example of the inconsistency i'm referring to, my first handpainted texture try. I somewhat like the shapes and colors but feel at a lost with the improper lines, they seem messy. I'd appreciate any help greatly!
Replies
Starting to get my hands wet with some rock modeling while waiting for the semester to end, a bit busy practicing for finals so haven't had much time to get working with what i want to get done so just having some fun with Blender.
Here is my attempt at grasping the minimalist stylized look from game such as Journey and The Witness, seems like a pretty good base but not sure if the approach is efficient. The issue is that it looks like simple low poly landscape rather than a stylized concept. I feel i do not have much control over the malleability of things either.
Shapes Mean Things
Quick shape practice with silhouettes, the concept is to create scribbled lines in zigzag to build shapes.
Text Me/Swatches
Current progress on a wood texture, paying a lot of attention to blocking and shapes, soon will start the dreaded linework!Not sure how to avoid the messy problem from my first post.