I needed to read this sentence. Thank you!
But don’t let that discourage you. If you want to make your own art, keep working at it. You will always get better with time and practice. It takes a long time and even the best artists frequently feel like their work isn’t good enough. But dedication and practice will pay off in time.
It's hard to dig really big holes in the ground all day at random, but it's not valuable.
Don't mistake "it takes a lot of effort" with "it is hard"
Digging holes isn't hard, it just takes a lot of effort
“part of” leaves a lot of room for each of us to insert our own definition of “valuable” here.
Let me introduce you to the last resort of the struggling artist - extreme stylization. Really good pixel art is a very difficult discipline but terrible pixel art can be just as appealing if you push a style you can call your own.
Be bold.
You are always going to think that you could have done it better. That's the curse of the artist; don't let it discourage you. Keep drawing and then draw some more.
My kid draws all the time and she gets better at it. She also asks me to draw for her and (surprise) I'm getting better at it. Draw a person. Draw a house. Draw a cartoon character. Draw an orange that just received bad news. Draw a lettuce riding a motorcycle. Don't wait to be in front of your computer so you can do pixel art; draw on a piece of paper, draw on your tablet, draw in the sand. Draw on a liquid crystal drawing board (great for throwaway drawings: no mess, quick erase, no drafts left behind).
And be kind to yourself. You are going to think that your drawings suck. I promise they are better than you think (one is always their own worst critic), but also be realistic on where you need to improve technically. Do ask for advice from other people, and take it gracefully.
(You want to do pixel art. Start with the art, and when you are good enough at it, add the pixel.)
eg - in the Natural Way to Draw - the best exercise (author's claim not mine) is daily homework of making a small composition from memory with a hard set time limit 15 mins. no touch up ever again. one and done. you're mind will want to do more, don't let it.
Some good old resources for inspiration: https://www.derekyu.com/makegames/index.html https://pixeljoint.com/ https://www.slynyrd.com/pixelblog-catalogue
I imagine a similar exercise might work for pixel art, with each square of the grid representing a single color.
The big insights came from how, in pixel art, a single high contrast pixel can give the impression of color or shade in a whole area of the image. For example, on a ladybug’s back, a few metallic blue pixels make it look more reflective than white, and doesn’t clash with the predominant red.
I used Resprite for iPad which is similar to Aesprite, for my Godot game.
Also, people seem to think pixel art is easier than others forms of art. I think this is a misconception that comes from being able to see the individual elements and being able to place them one by one. This does remove the need for the same type of motor skills required for say painting, but does not remove the need for vision, sense of color, composition. Etc.
It’s actually a game about nonograms. My first attempts at pixel art were bad but it didn’t matter that much, the focus was elsewhere anyway. With time the art improved; far from perfect but it’s still one of the things I like most about that game.
So I guess: practice, room for failure, achievable goals and time.
I also plan to update screenshots but some are here: https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748...
While there’s no shortcut, I would suggest that in games, consistency in art style is way more important than quality. If you can make your graphic style consistent, although maybe very simple and not so aesthetic, it will make the game appealing.
From what I understand of pixel art, it demands all the techniques of drawing on top of trying to create a recognizable shape with only a few pixels and colours. From your question, it sounds like you're jumping directly onto pixel art without a solid foundation on drawing techniques, and I'd suggest to focus there — at least that's what I'm doing with my personal learning path.
Also be realistic about how much progress you can make in a certain amount of time. You can make a game with very basic sprites. As your art improves, so can the sprites in the games.
The other option is to partner up with someone who has art skills already, but can’t make games. Together you can make more than either one could make alone.
https://norvig.com/21-days.html
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Peter Norvig
Why is everyone in such a rush?
Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books. Of the top ten, nine are programming books (the other is about bookkeeping). Similar results come from replacing "teach yourself" with "learn" or "hours" with "days."
The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. Felleisen et al. give a nod to this trend in their book How to Design Programs, when they say "Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies." The Abtruse Goose comic also had their take.
[...]
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967.
[...]
My wife likes to take images and crochet them into tapestry/blankets/cozies.
It seems to me that if we could get a grid overlay onto an image she could then make whatever she wanted. (One color per 'pixel')
Seems like if you print the image, then print a grid on a transparency sheet, you could mark up the sheet with colors until it looks good.
Maybe tracing paper (can you print a grid on tracing paper? Do you want to hand mark a grid on tracing paper?)
I don't use art tools, but you should be able to do something in software too, layer the grid on top, leave it transparent to the image until you pick a color for each square.
Think about how much time you invested in to learning programming. If you're not prepared to do the same for art it's better to get someone else to do it. Especially if you don't enjoy it.
In my experience, finding communities is kinda hard
Or Look at where artists hang out. This could be pixel art forums. Also contact artists that you admire directly (would need to show something here and not merely an idea obviously). Paying for an artist is also worth considering if that's an option.
As a designer, artist and art technologist that has been making computer graphics since the 80s, reading a post like this is somewhat triggering , but I do also understand why today in the age of AI, it would seem that making great art should come easily to you, once you have learned the basics of the tools.
But it is called art, BECAUSE it is difficult, it does require one to build systematically through experience. Practicing and playing with the medium constantly, doing a plethora of varied exercises and trying do very different types of projects will increase your skillset and teach you the necessary grammar of visual problem solving.
You will also always benefit and become even more proficient by looking at and reading about tons and tons of design, graphics, and art books, websites, shows, works, etc… This is especially true of learning about and studying art that is unrelated to computer graphics —like fine arts, painting/printmaking/sculpture/conceptual art, as well as experimental film/video/animation and architecture/industrial design/historical graphic design, all of which will help you build up your visual vocabulary and problem solving skills. you dont have to do everything at once just add a steady diet of new visual material to your media consumption. Specifically not the CG/Gaming stuff you already look at. broaden your horizons.
A great artist is the combination of technical skills, a deep knowledge base of visual references, a good understanding and continuous study of art history and a solid grasp of art & craft theory and concepts—-craft here being CGI. This is will give you the solid foundation to build a successful and sustainable artistic career/hobby/vocation.
The limits of creativity is always a lack of foundational knowledge (visual/conceptual references) and curiosity (playing and exploring even when you hit a wall until you find solutions for your artistic problems).
Visual arts are very very vast, but systematically learning to see, examine and understand how others before you have, played, struggled with, confronted and resolved its conundrums are the only way to get better at it. (Find a copy of and read Rilke’s letters).
Now, if you wanted to share your experience, and offer it as a potential path to add additional skills into OPs practice, then it could come off as helpful: "Hey, I teach design, and have found that studying x, y, z can bring you some additional knowledge that will help..." is a far more open way to express the same idea.
- Start low-res. See what you can draw in the smallest possible space. Choices about a shape or line become binary and easy to experiment with. I'm talking 10x10 px.
- Limit your palette. Try some NES-style monochrome sprites. This will let you focus on shape and not worry about color yet. This will also teach you how to use negative space for coherence.
- Color can get tricky because sometimes you have to draw counterintuitively. There were many situations in some 8x16 sprites I drew where the light and dark shade of blue were used inconsistently in terms of shading, in order to make the shapes more distinct to the viewer. What looks coherent zoomed all the way in will not necessarily look coherent zoomed out.
- Modify existing sprites. You will learn a lot this way.
- You don't need to start with another medium. Not sure why people are suggesting this. You don't learn golf to get better at lacrosse. And frankly IMO pixel art is one of the easiest mediums to self-teach. I have no other visual art talent.
- Draw a class of sprites as practice, don't get too hung up on a specific one. I drew dozens of woodland creature faces in monochrome 10x10. This will help you develop a visual language for what you're doing, shifting pixels so the various sprites look distinct but cohesive in style.
- Legibility is king. Some people prioritize beauty but the player needs to know what they're looking at instantly, at least once acquainted. The sprites in Streets of Rogue exemplify this.
- Skip the guides, honestly. You might be overthinking it. I self-taught fine and I'm no artist. It will take more than a month.
- Remember to enjoy what you're doing. Don't make it too much into a work task with concrete goals, yet.
- Try some 2-frame animations. Some sprites only make sense to the eye in motion.
Nope. Turns out it's a whole field of study and an artform in its own right.
If you're making a top-down perspective game, I wholeheartedly recommend Liberated Pixel Cup assets, especially the character generator:
https://liberatedpixelcup.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spriteshee...
There's a crazy number of configuration options and you can create all kinds of humanoid characters out of it.
Pixel art takes a shit ton of time.