Recently for many of my portfolio images, I've been exploring the limits of what I can do in Photoshop to create images that are weird and fun. It has been exciting to explore areas of the program I haven't used much before and see what I can make out of them. This has led me down paths I would be too scared to go down for a normal project. I've used weird brushes to create painting-like images. I've messed around with the blur tool to soften lines and create weird atmospheres. In the future I'm planning to dive even more into these tools. The more I use tools in a creative, experimental manner, the better I can use them when creating an actual piece of artwork for a project. Already I feel excited to put the brush tool to use sprucing up the basic polygons I use to create the main bodies of my Photoshop works.
Continuing to experiment and evolve is one of the things you always need to be doing as an artist. Most of the time we are unmotivated to break outside of our comfort zone. It's hard to start a piece of art that you know isn't going to look great. However, the tools I've used while creating my last line of works in PS have shown me unique ways to make things look good even if the works themselves look less-than perfect. For every great masterpiece in PS there are at least too or three failed abominations and that's beautiful in its own way. In the coming weeks I look forward to finding even more tools in PS and getting to use them in a creative and powerful way. -Exploring creatively in Photoshop -Why it helps me grow
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There are many things one can do to convey messages in video games. The fact that we have an art form that is so versatile gives us a wealth of ways to toy with player's emotion, thoughts, and actions. My personal favorite is how a good game artist can use sound to affect the mood of an area and set the tone of a game. However there is another even more basic, but incredibly important, way game designers set the scene in games.
Character art is one the the most important ways to convey information to a player. They will often spend hours of the game play staring at the graphics of their player. What better way to show the person playing your game something important about the game's atmosphere. In an apocalyptic game for example you wouldn't want your character to look like a cartoon anime girl. Instead you might want to take that cheery model and muddy it up somehow. Ordinary objects like footballs turned deadly with added spikes for example. This tells the playing that something has gone wrong in the world. It says yes this may look like the world we once new but it is far more dangerous, far more deadly. Another example of this is seen in the Pokemon franchise. Pokemon games are often based off of specific regions in the world. To highlight this fact, the designs of pokemon in each new region often reflect the attitudes or defining characteristics of the place they represent. Alolan Exeggutor looks like a tall palm tree making it look more pacific islander than its normal, squatter cousin. The garbage pokemon Garbodor was introduced in Pokemon Black and White a game representing... well America. As you can see there are many ways to use character design to convey messages of tone and place to your player. By utilizing this you can make your games unified in theme and even more immersive for your player. In this Post: -How to give subtle messages to your player in games -The advantages of using good character design -Examples of how to utilize good character design in games Drawing Basics and Video Game Art: Character Design by Chris Solarski Summary and Application3/12/2016 This article starts by talking about how game art and classical art is similar. It emphasizes that just like the old art masters in order to make your game art truly great you need to practice daily through quick small sketches. The article also stresses that keeping up good studio practices such as daily presentations and open feedback. It then begins to talk abut designing your character. To start it says that you should always create a high concept first in designing anything. This should include descriptive words on how you want your audience to feel. After that you need to start collecting research materials. You can do this either by taking quick sketches of things around you that give you a certain emotion or through researching images on google and creating quick sketches that way. Then you need to design the basic body shape of your character and use it as a mannequin to apply your rough sketches to. Eventually by combining many of these shapes you can design out the rough sketch of your character. To make sure that the features used in this character are obvious it is a good idea to silhouette the character and make sure you still get the same feeling out of it without all the details. Last you can redraw the character leaving out any unnecessary details and add colors and shading.
This article taught me that it is important to not only research The obvious things such as clothing while designing a character but to also research other things that evoke strong feelings and can be used in a more abstract form in my character to evoke those same feelings. It also showed me that it is the concept of how I want my audience to feel that is most important in my artwork and I should focus on that if I want my artwork to look truly emotional and real. Over the past week we have been working with photo shop to create art work for 2D games. I learned many new techniques that use a mouse to create good looking art that could go on a mobile game. The most important technique I learned was how to use the burn and dodge tool to give my artwork some depth. With the burn and dodge tool I learned how important it is to be careful where I click so I don't put any shadows or light spots in the wrong place. I also learned that it is wise to add shadows to each layer individually then merge them so if I mess up I won't have to start over from the beginning. I will use this technique in the future to add shadows and give depth to my artwork to make it look better than ever before.
Another technique I learned was how to add an overlapping effect to my land blocks so it will look like one pattern all the way across my level. This is a cool visual effect that really makes my ground look professional and adds a sense of uniformity to my artwork. This technique can be used to create good looking repeating patterns for walls, floors and even clothing. Over the past week we have been working with vector images on Adobe Illustrator. I found how fun it can be to work with simple shapes to form complex objects. It was fun to take normal shapes and contort them using different tools and features within Illustrator. However there were many hard things about working in Illustrator such as having to arrange shapes on a single layer whereas they were all on their own layer in Photo Shop. Another hard part about using Illustrator was that in order to upload anything to the internet it first had to be exported into a bit map and when uploaded it would a lot of times appear pixelated or have random negative colors.
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AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Categories
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