As I mentioned in my last post, for the most part this blog has been dedicated to my attempts to become better at using traditional media (particularly oil paints). Even the digital art I have done has mostly been intended as a means to an end, a cheaper and faster way of experimenting with color so that I can apply what I've learned to oil paintings. I also touched on the fact that my focus on traditional media has led to a lot of frustration, quite simply because I'm not that good at it. I mean that in a relative sense, of course; I realize I have a fair amount of general artistic talent. But I have a really hard time painting in oils (or acrylic or watercolor for that matter), because it can take hours just to get my palette right, not to mention all the expensive oil paint that goes to waste when I have a hard time with it and end up creating tons of unusable color. Especially once I started working full-time, I simply didn't have the time and energy to deal with all this frustration, so at first my solution was simply to quit and focus on other forms of self-care.
Meanwhile, when I'm painting in Photoshop, I have an undo function, the ability to adjust the color balance of the entire canvas without having to mix a whole new set of colors, and a palette that spans the entire range of colors that can be reproduced on my computer screen with a simple click. The downsides of working this way include the fact that the skill isn't as transferrable if I do want to get better at oils, as well as the fact that I don't end up with a shiny, textured canvas as the end result. I've recently decided, though, that the good outweighs the bad: I'm much better at digital art, and can produce more impressive images with less effort and less frustration. As a result, it ends up being a lot more fun.
Starting about six months after I began writing this blog, I was creating digital images for their own sake alongside the practice images I have been sharing here. I didn't include these images in my blog, partly because they reflect my nerdier side, but also partly because for a long time I simply forgot about them. Now that I've decided to focus more on digital art for its own sake, I've decided to go back and revisit what I've done.
One of the first things I was curious about when I began using my digital art tablet and painting in Photoshop was how the images I had seen in comics and video games had been created. I didn't draw this image; the outlines are just from a comic book page I downloaded off Google Images. But I did do the coloring and shading and the dot matrix effect. As it turns out, modern comic books are generally made by filling in large areas of color much like a children's coloring book and then applying layered filters on top of these areas of color (called "flats") to produce shading and highlights. For someone with an analytical mind like me who has learned to think of color in terms of mathematical relationships between hue, saturation, and value, this is a lot more intuitive and natural to me than mixing each individual shade separately as is generally done with oil paintings. (At least contemporary ones... Older paintings were often done with a more or less monochrome layer establishing the values and several layers of colored glaze over the top, and many people still paint this way, but it takes months to complete a painting this way and I simply don't have the studio space or training involved.)
A lot of promotional art and some concept art for video games is done the same way. These images come from the instruction manual for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
I tried to get a little more experimental on this one, which is partly why it's actually a worse drawing than the version of the same drawing in my last post, which I did in high school. After I did this one I sort of lost interest in this style of art for a while, because I became more interested in practicing skills that would carry over to oil paintings.
About a year and a half ago I read a series of instructional books on how to do digital fantasy and science fiction art. Some of the contributing artists used 3D modeling programs to create geometric objects like vehicles and cityscapes, and then used them as a starting point for 2D paintings. I'd done a little 3D modeling in high school and decided to have some fun with it, using a spaceship from a science fiction story my brother wrote when he was 18 or so as inspiration. Surprisingly (to me at least), this model only took a few hours to make; I spent about 4 hours making it originally and then a few additional hours modifying it based on feedback I received from him about how accurately it reflected his vision of what the ship was supposed to look like. It was fun to feel like I was doing something "commissioned," even though I technically did it on my own and asked for feedback rather than actually being commissioned. I intended to use this in a piece of cover artwork that he could use for his online listings of the story, and somewhere in the back of my mind I'm still planning on doing this, even though I've now put it off for a year and a half. The following is a thumbnail of one possible cover design I thought up:
I was 9 or 10 when my brother wrote this book, and reading it had a big influence on my idea of what was possible in terms of applying my creativity. I tried to write a bunch of space operas of my own in response, all of which were huge ripoffs of his story. I think the thing that stands out to me the most when I think about how my brother doing this impacted me is the fact that he is a lot less afraid of what other people will think about what he does than I am; I would never have had the courage to actually write a science fiction novel and post it in public without getting tons of anonymous feedback and heavily editing it to accommodate other people's opinions, whereas my brother flatly refused to change any aspects of the story that other people might find strange because the point was to explore his own imagination, not to create something that would become popular. As someone who always daydreamed of becoming famous but who was also pathologically afraid of even revealing that I had hobbies--let alone what I was doing with them--if I thought people would think they were stupid, that was incomprehensible to me. (Even finally including fantasy and sci-fi art in my public blog is a bit nerve-wracking to me, even though let's be honest, it will come as a surprise to exactly no one that I am this much of a nerd.)
The real culmination of my public admission of nerdiness, though, comes from a more recent project. A few months ago, about six months after I'd "quit" making art, my sister's boyfriend, which is a computer science major, approached me with an offer to help create visuals for a group project he was doing in his game design class. The part of me that spent hours and hours daydreaming about designing my own games as a 5-year-old got very excited. I decided to do pixel art in the style of the old NES games I grew up on, and it was a lot of fun. The problem was that since I didn't know anything about how the framework they were using to create the game worked, the graphics I produced didn't really work. They ended up being in the wrong format, blurry, and not really functional with the way they were putting the game together. That was that, until it became clear that working on additional projects like this was a possibility, at which point I really tapped into the deepest, nerdiest part of my imagination and decided to actually learn how to assemble the game I had done art for myself, so that I would know how to help in the future.
When I was in middle school, my brother (who is also a computer programmer) taught me how to use Visual Basic, a simple programming language. It's definitely not intended to be used to make games, but my brother had made a simple game for his senior project in high school and I thought it seemed fun. I actually made a couple of playable games myself.
This was at the absolute lowest point of my life in terms of socialization--I had virtually no friends I saw outside of school and church; I was picked on constantly; essentially everything about my life was absolutely miserable. In response, I had retreated further than ever into my own head, which provided an escape but also made me even more oblivious to my surroundings and made the harassment worse. I reacted violently against the parts of myself that I believed were making the problem worse. That included my knowledge of computer programming. I not only stopped trying to learn or make anything computer-related, but decided that I hated computers in general altogether. I seemed to think that there was some sort of linear relationship between liking computers and being picked on, as if the more I hated computers the cooler I would be. When I later discovered that this didn't make any sense and didn't reflect reality, I sort of regretted this decision, but at the time it seemed like the only way to survive.
I did do much better socially after I quit learning about computers, but I'm not sure that's why I did better socially. Still, the perception that there is some sort of linear, causal relationship there persists in my subconscious. When I decided to revisit computer programming as a 27-year-old, I felt certain that I was committing social suicide. Maybe I could do it, but I certainly couldn't talk about it. I feel like this is very important for me to discuss on this blog because my imagination hasn't gone away, even though I have continually tried to suppress it. That child who had so many lofty ideas of imaginary worlds I wanted to give life to is still an integral part of my identity, and I can either continue to react against it with shame and repression or I can find a way to reconcile it with the fact that I am now a sociable adult who does not get picked on anymore.
I have a strong creative drive because I have a vivid imagination and feel a strong need to do something with it; as long as I try to resist that, my art is going to be hollow and unfulfilling. Creating art needs to be something I do for myself, as a form of self-care, not something I do for other people. Hell, if we're being honest most of my friends don't actually give a damn about my art anyway (although they acknowledge that it's pretty good), so why keep making something that I think might please them? I'd still like to have some sort of fan base, but that's going to be more likely if I'm making a greater volume of art, which in turn is more likely if I'm doing something that is personally fulfilling and also just plain fun. So that's why I'm giving up the illusion of wanting to be the "tortured genius" type of artist and embracing my imagination as an adult.
And as a symbol of my willingness to embrace that, I'm going public with probably the single nerdiest thing I've ever done. I actually remembered a surprising amount of my programming skills from middle school, and I'm a fast learner, so it wasn't that hard to pick up the C# programming language and learn to use the Unity game engine. After a couple months of work, I made a somewhat playable version of the game I made pixel art for. The premise is that a baker has been abducted by aliens and needs to recover his stolen recipes and escape the alien ship. Here are a few clips from what I was able to put together:
(You'll have to excuse the poor video quality; I don't have a good video recording system on my computer and I put off making and posting this for so long already that I didn't feel like putting additional effort into making it look perfect. It's pixel art, so you still get the general idea even if it's a bit blurry.)
It's not actually a complete, playable game, and I may or may not continue down the indie game design road. But the fact that I can publicly acknowledge that it's even a possibility is kind of a big deal for me.