The Gaming Den

I want to be able to make pretty pictures from scratch on a PC. Basically looking for tips both for art in general and specifically digital art.

I found myself drawing significantly better than before after I accidentally learned a bit of perspective from a coding tutorial. Any other helpful tricks like that?

I have a Genius tablet, but am still a little uncomfortable with it. Using the tablet to draw, my lines look wobbly. My art looks better if I trace it later line by line in vector format (or draw it by drawing lines and bending them), but that feels pretty tedious. Any suggestions?

There are a pile of excellent free online tutorials. Google around and see which one strikes your fancy.

My suggestion from experience is true for drawing in general-- practice and obsess. I learned perspective from Mark Kistler shows and my own obsession of practicing it. I learned anatomy by practicing and obsessing over using the actual structure of things for the old "Stick and Bubble" drawing.

Youtube has a surprising number of tutorials on painting with tools like Photoshop where you can watch the entire painting process. Learning to set up digital brushes and using the blending tools is also a subset of those tutorials that I found incredibly useful.

The internet in general is a great place to find artists who are worthy of emulation if you focus on working game concept artists. Kotaku.com and IO9.com tend to feature galleries of various working concept artists and I bookmark the better ones.

That being said, there are not a lot of quick tricks. Digital Art and regular Drawing classes basically just focus on a few key concepts like negative space and perspective and then dance around the more bullshit concepts like rhythm or unity.

Prak_Anima wrote:My suggestion from experience is true for drawing in general-- practice and obsess. I learned perspective from Mark Kistler shows and my own obsession of practicing it. I learned anatomy by practicing and obsessing over using the actual structure of things for the old "Stick and Bubble" drawing.

Thanks, I'll look those up. As for practice, it's nice, but I could use some feedback. I might open up a thread here as the folks at deviantart don't seem to offer criticism too often.

Leress wrote:http://www.alexhays.com/loomis/

Thanks. This looks pretty awesome on a quick skim.

K wrote:Youtube has a surprising number of tutorials on painting with tools like Photoshop where you can watch the entire painting process. Learning to set up digital brushes and using the blending tools is also a subset of those tutorials that I found incredibly useful.

The internet in general is a great place to find artists who are worthy of emulation if you focus on working game concept artists. Kotaku.com and IO9.com tend to feature galleries of various working concept artists and I bookmark the better ones.

That being said, there are not a lot of quick tricks. Digital Art and regular Drawing classes basically just focus on a few key concepts like negative space and perspective and then dance around the more bullshit concepts like rhythm or unity.

Thanks, watching a video on drawing something from scratch is pretty helpful. I still don't get why they never taught perspective back in art class at school (8th grade and below), but that could be a regional thing.

I'm also interested in animation and 3D modeling, but I think I'll focus on trying to significantly improve 2D drawing first.