Where to begin?

Hello, so I'm a new game developer. I'm usually just a programmer but I struggle with actually creating games because I never have any actual art for a game. I've tried using premade assets from the unity asset store but sometimes it's just difficult to actually work with. I've never been an artist, I've actually been really bad at drawing (I can barely draw a stick figure without making it look bad), however, I want to change this. I'm gonna be getting adobe photoshop, as well as a drawing tablet to help me get started. I was wondering if anyone out there could point me in the right direction on where to begin getting better at art? I want to eventually be able to create my own concept art and turn them into 3d models that I can use in games. I'm willing to spend money on classes from sites such as Udemy, but I don't know what classes would be helpful, or if you have any series on YouTube that really helped you out. Once again, I'm a complete noob when it comes to drawing, so I need to learn the very basics, however, I want to go in the direction of video game development. Would something such as starting with pixel art be a good idea? In the future, I want to go more for realism, but maybe pixel art is a good place to start, or maybe it's a really bad place to start if pixel art isn't something I want to focus on later. I'm assuming 2d games would be a good place to start since it isn't as complex as creating 3d art, but I want to eventually get into creating 3d art. Any advice would be nice, thank you!

 

Hello and welcome!

ATM, I'm creating an insurance game for mobile with simple graphics using flame-engine.org.

I would recommend staying simple first. So it is definitely a good idea to start with pixel art. As you become more competent you can move to 3d concept art. I would also recommend abandoning the Adobe suite and using something like affinity photo or affinity designer first.

 

Since you're a beginner, there's a few starting points I highly recommend:

Figure Drawing For All It's Worth, Andrew Loomis
This is the big one. It'll help get you started on the fundamentals of how to draw human/humanoid figures in such a way that you'll be able to tell where you can cheat stylistically in the future.

This is a nice guide to gesture drawing
Gesture drawing is your best friend when it comes to drawing organic things in motion. It will also help you convey movement directions.

The Animator's Survival Kit, Richard Williams
By all accounts, one of the best books on animation. This isn't just helpful for 2D animation, but 3D as well since it teaches you a lot of good techniques like where to set up your keyframing to best convey things like movement weight. Hunt around, you might find an even better deal than this.

I had a reference for digital painting and texture, but I can't seem to find it right now.

 

Team up with someone who enjoys and is good at the at side. This either means collaborative projects, hiring a freelancer, or working as a freelancer.

 

I think there is a 30% off sale at Affinity Desinger and photo now so grab it while you can!

 

I'll go ahead and look into Affinity, I only chose photoshop because when I use to watch tutorials of people creating 3d models and such for their games they would use photoshop to create the art and I figured most tutorials would use it. However if Affinity is also a useful tool I'll definitely check it out, thank you! I also appreciate the links to these videos, I'll most definitely be watching them.

I would do this but I don't have a lot of money to spend on people creating art, and I don't want to have to rely on other people at this moment. I have attempted to work with a couple of friends, but because they have other things going on and creating art for my game isn't that high of a priority I end up having to wait a while to get anything. I'd rather spend the money on learning how to create art, and develop a team later when I can find people who want to work with me, and spend more time on projects.

 

Definitely wouldn't recommend using Adobe now since their pricing model is a rip off. I would get 'Designer' and 'Photo' if I were you then and that will entitle you to a lifetime of updates.

Also, stay away from anything 3D as well for the time being.

 

I'll be purchasing both of them, but just so I understand a little more, what's the difference between Designer and Photo. From the descriptions, it sounds like I can use Affinity Designer to create art, and I can use Affinity Photo to edit photos. Is there something in Affinity Photo that I'll need to use that I can't do with Affinity Designer?

Also, I'll stay away from 3D art, for now, I can get by with just pixel art and creating 2D games. I just needed to get pointed in the right direction so I appreciate it very much!

 

'Designer' allows you to do proper pixel art (but really it is for vector illustrations)
'Photo' is closer to photohop where you do compositing and rasterisation.

I mainly use Affinity photo for my high end AAA concept art, along with resources like pinterest, dribbble and deviant art.

For my pixel art I use Affinity designer.

TLDR; Get both as they're so cheap.

 

Well, it sounds like I have a lot of research to do because I have no idea what vector art is, nor do I know what compositing and rasterisation is. Thanks for help!

 

Vector art is stuff that doesn't pixelate so you can keep zooming in. It also makes it easy to export to all kinds of different sizes.

ATM I'm using pixel art with flame-engine as it is highly performant on mobile devices and runs on the SKIA UI.

https://skia.org/

 

Starting with focusing so much on art and willing to spend money on assets, without having background and knowing what you need in topic, is really bad idea.

Does you have anything built yet, which is playable and don't require art? Like using simple placeholders.

Most of the time, art can be added and replaced later in game dev.

 

Except this means that by the time the art pass comes, they won't have the ability to actually replace those placeholder assets. It's best to start learning now.

 

This kind of question is very difficult to answer unambiguously. The real question is whether you like creating art, or find satisfaction in it. If you don't, it will be brutal months of hard work to make something that most people will dismiss as ugly or mediocre. Unless you really are someone who can experience the full satisfaction of life from solving a set of innumerable simultaneous equations, and you eat magatons of data for breakfast (i.e. you are a computer), attempting to create meaningful art using a combination of logic and low dopamine levels is likely to prove very difficult indeed.

In that case, I think it makes more sense to work together with someone else who can fully take on that role. It's tempting to try to do everything on one's own, or at least buffer against that possibility, but there are some things such as families and video games that pretty much require cooperation between two or more people to produce anything close to an optimum result.

And I would highly, highly recommend to not start in 2D. It's actually artistically much more difficult to produce good 2D art than 3D (especially when the 3D is realistic). Realistic art mostly requires an eye for detail (and lighting takes care of itself), but working along the fine lines of stylistic rules, and knowing when and how they can be broken, takes a lot more artistic talent in my opinion. Pixel art is the definition of stylism. Not to mention that 2D is far more saturated and difficult to make money with.

My suggestion would be to start with a realistic 3D simulation game, it'll be much more work but you'll likely have a much better chance at succeeding with it.

PS feel free to ignore this advice if any of my many assumptions are wrong.
PPS my assumptions are rarely wrong.

 

If you are trying to make a small game and you want some asset to use for now to help you learn about putting art assets into the game, I would recommend looking at Kenney's site here. He releases a ton of free assets that anyone can use. You can get your prototype and early game up and running with actual art assets. You will also gain some experience that should help you decide what you want to buy later. It is mostly 2D, but there are some low poly 3D as well.

For early small games or things you are producing not to be a AAA commercial success but to get games under your belt, you can go start to finish with Kenney assets, plus possibly some bits and bobs found elsewhere to fill in gaps. Add that to your studying art as you go, and I think you will end up with a decent understanding of what you want and need for your games.

If nothing else, you can complete a game with these assets, decide it is worth more than the "generic" look since a lot of people use Kenney assets, and you will now have a fully functioning game you can use as a pitch to artists or publishers or whatever to get partners to do specifically designed art.

 

To add to whats said here, to be good at visual you need to hit 3 main competance:
1- Visual literacy
2- Visual sensibility
3- gesture

1. This one is about the knowledge and culture, knowing the basics of composition such has gestalt, rules of third, golden number, etc ... on top of knowing the basis of various technique, trend, history, movement. It's kinda "intellectual" not in the cultural sense, but in that it doesn't constitute practice but forging appreciation of the "how and why". It's easy to get as a skills, generally mere exposition or immersion is enough, you don't have to think too deeply about it, being aware is generally enough.

2. this part is driven through observation, it's about developing your own perception and sensibilities, your own eyes, how do you see and interpret stuff. It's learning to pay attention.

3. well just practice, while most people feel the urgency to do drawing right away, especially as they start drawing for a need, I would suggest to go the martial way. Spend a lot of time drawing basic exercise to train the hand, like pages and pages of lines, circles and most basic shapes, it's important it become a transparent routine, it has to become like breathing, I mean it literally, gesture is often link to breathing, that's not something you can get by thinking about it, it has to become a second nature.

A lot of basic drawing to forge proportion, volume, shadow, and anatomy is also very important, on top of a LOT of drawing through direct observations of reality, drawing from flat reference (photo) or even tracing is important too but really observation of real 3D form is key, mostly because you have to interpret how to translate that to 2D (and the fact the eyes is a constantly moving camera unlike flat references).

The best exercises is basically draw something as close as possible to references with as little help as possible (for example looking at it while drawing), then compare the too, then start again to correct the difference, up until they are exactly the same. If you can reproduce a photo, from memory, and then you can overlay the drawing to the photo and it looks like it's been trace, well you have achieve a milestone in mastery, most artist don't even go that far though, but that's a metric that allow you to judge progress.

That said, I haven't drawn in ages ... I should apply those to myself lol. I also left a part that is kinda important (the equivalent of mugen in martial art) but it's over the scope of what you need right now I think.

 

I haven't read all the nuanced answers. I give a quick motivational:

Anybody can learn to art. If you can speak and be understood by other humans, you can art.

The complexity of the art you make has no correlation to the enjoyment others will gain from it.

Everything is just a question of time and energy. I always propose self-reliance, but you got to learn where your own personal limit is. Maybe with perseverance you learn to love art and get better at it. Maybe it feels like pulling teeth so you resign to letting others handle it. Doesn't matter -- where there's the will you find a way.

Thing about working with other people is, you don't get what you want. You get a version based on what you communicate. If you can't live with that, well tough luck.

Marco Bucci has a nice youtube channel that covers art fundamentals in very digestible format.

 

+ realism is the best place to start. All stylization is based from foundational understanding of the real world.

 

I would say that stylization is based on an emotionally filtered perception of the real world. It's certainly not separate from reality, but it's not necessarily completely (or even mostly) logical. It takes the intended emotional effect of an object and translates it back into physical features to double down on that effect without too much regard for whether those features make logical sense.

In my opinion, the key difference between artists and non-artists is the extent to which they are willing or able to be emotionally activated by objects, scenes and people, and to channel that experience in an expressive way. Artistry is the transferrence of the (mostly) logical into the (mostly) emotional, which is exactly the reverse of what many people who are drawn to programming and engineering type jobs are looking for.

Also, the way I see it, an artist can only express 10% of what they feel about something. Which means that you can only give someone 10% of the magnitude of an experience that you have about something. So if you are someone with a low emotional response to begin with, and your own experience of something barely moves the needle of your own emotions, the chances of blowing someone else's mind about it are slim to nil.

The way you experience the world around you, of course, can be adjusted to some extent if you choose, but it is not the same thing as simply learning the technique of art. Nor is doing so the kind of sacrifice that many people are willing to make.