I don’t really have a style. I have a way that I draw or model or design characters, but I don’t really have a style.
I was watching an artist on YouTube, something I do quite a lot, and they were trying something a little outside of their ordinary, but they said that they were adapting it to their own style. Have you ever seen those articles or news pieces about how some people think in fully formed images, some people only think in words. It often comes as a wonder to many of them that there are people out there that process the world in very different ways. That one person can hold an extremely vivid, three dimensional representation of a tomato in their imagination, while another person can clearly imagine a symbolic representation of the letters in the word tomato with only a tangential connection to what a tomato is or looks like. I imagine that picturing the perfectly realized tomato is what knowing your own art style is like. So I do what so many people with slightly different thought patterns do. I fake it. I have a way that my hand likes to make lines. I have an attraction to certain forms and shapes. I put those into my work and shrug at it. Maybe that’s my style. I don’t feel like it is, but if other people can look at something I have drawn or sculpted, and recognize that it might have come from me, maybe that’s all that having a style is. I watched that artist on YouTube draw a set of portraits. They were all recognizably from the same artist. They did what they said they would do. They adapted those portraits to their own style. Did they just use shapes and arcs that their hand could draw, and continue to reuse shapes that they were attracted to. Maybe, but I don’t think so. It seemed like they had a personal style that they had spent time crafting. They chose an aesthetic and they bent all of their art toward it. I can honestly say that I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know what that is. That tomato doesn’t exist for me. I fake it. I make the marks I make and I bend the image in a way that solves the problem I am trying to solve. I adjust proportions, I infer emotion, I attempt to tell a story. If any of that comes out as some sort of cohesive personal style might be for other people to decide. That part of my brain just doesn’t work that way.
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I had reason to think recently about the way that art is taught.
I think there are a lot of art teachers, instructors, and professors out there that do a fantastic job. You can even find many of them on YouTube or various art instruction channels. I’m talking ‘capital A’ art here. As in, any medium of expression that people use that is not purely informational. Visual art, music, performance, writing, interactive, culinary, fashion, architectural, competitive, martial, etc, etc, etc. There are a thousand and one books on any artistic topic you might be interested in. Dozens of courses offered at an institute of learning near you. Art is our first, and most diverse, form of cultural communication. Art is the difference between loose groups of cave dwelling hominids and globe spanning civilizations. Art is on a very short list of the things that make humans human. And we keep on teaching it to each other wrong. I have written here before about how art isn’t a thing you make, it’s a thing you do. There are exactly as many ways to do art as there are people. Every single one of us will do the things we do in slightly different ways. We will create our cultural artifacts or express our ephemeral performance arts in slightly different ways than any other person. Art is also an industry, and industry requires some amount of consistency. A level of repeatability. The good thing is that a trained and practiced human is pretty adept at consistency. We are good at creating patterns and repetition. It’s in our nature. We build machines and tools that aid in our consistency. The problem is, that sometimes, we mistake the industry and consistency for quality. There is a large contingent of the art instruction world that would like nothing more than to create robots. Individuals that will, when asked, repeat a set of processes to create a consistent, repeatable, product. They think they are teaching art, but they are teaching the creation of artifacts. Art and artifacts are very different things. Artifacts might be what we make, but art is what we do and how we do it. The only way to get better at anything, is through practice. Repetition. No person starts out making their first mark on paper and ends up producing a masterpiece. You have to practice. You have to work through processes. But that doesn’t mean that you only have to practice making that one mark. I suppose it’s a mindset more than the actual, physical steps that you have to take. You can, of course, draw seven thousand circles so that you might be better at drawing circles. But that’s not all that you learned. In drawing those circles, you learned the arc of your hand. The dexterity of your wrist. You learned the rhythm of movement. The pressure and angle you can apply to graphite. You didn’t just make circles. You aren’t only good at making circles. You have learned motions and processes that can be applied to drawing any form. You can draw a hip, an ear, a leaf, a stream flowing past a cottage illuminated by moonlight. You didn’t only learn to draw circles. There are far too many teachers trying to teach new people to draw new circles so that they can take up positions in the circle drawing industry. These new people will be practiced, they will be consistent, but unless they realize the depth and breadth of what they have learned they will go on thinking that they are quite good at drawing circles, and nothing more. Art is the act of creating. That is the part that needs to be taught. Best Games - Shatterhand (Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain)
By 1991 the last nails were already being driven into the coffin of the NES. The console wouldn't actually be discontinued for years, and in its home market of Japan, a full decade. Games would continue to trickle out during those years (there are still games being made for the old Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System), but releasing a game for that machine in 1991 was just asking for it to be forgotten. At the tail end of a console's life there are usually only two kinds of games that get released. Weird licensed games and games that started development way earlier but took a long time to reach release. Either way, the results are not usually stellar. Shatterhand is sort of an outlier. It originated as a licensed game based on a Japanese action show. Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain or Super Rescue Solbrain was a superhero show where cops wore special high tech armor to fight crime in Tokyo. This is the sort of thing that licensed game dreams are made of. If you want to make some money selling games to kids there are a few things you will need to do. Make something flashy, make it vaguely resemble the show, design and develop it quickly so that it comes out while the show is still relevant. Making the game good usually doesn’t factor into these equations. If you can, you just copy another game, a popular game, and you use all of those mechanics in your licensed game. Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain does none of that. Actually, that’s not entirely true. They did make the game quickly, and it did come out when the show was still on the air, but Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain is not a quick flip of some existing game design. It is the height of what the developer, Angel, was capable of making at the time. Nearly a decade into working with the famicom hardware, they made a game that is rock solid, interesting, challenging, beautiful, and, above all, fun. That isn’t normal for licensed games. Even if people from Angel or Bandai suspected that they may have a hit on their hands, localizing the game must have been difficult. Obviously, very few people outside of Japan had any reverence for Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain. Instead of a basic translation, the developers opted to create Shatterhand, a recreation of the original with new art, a slightly modified story, and some new level designs. Playing them back to back, I would even say that Shatterhand plays a bit nicer. Smoother. Better. The game is, as the English name would suggest, all about punching. Unlike Mega Man your attack range is the length of your arm. That means that playing Shatterhand feels a lot more timing based and visceral. There is an immediacy to all your actions that just feels great to play. You do have more than your fists to get you through the game. Shatterhand also has one of the most innovative upgrade systems I think I have ever seen. You collect Greek lettered power ups, either Alpha or Beta. When you collect three of them they combine to activate a satellite robot. Depending on the order you collected them, you will get a different helper, with different abilities. Trying them all out and finding which ones are the most useful for each stage offers a whole range of exploration that action games of this type just don’t have. To top that, if you collect two sets of the same robot helper in rapid succession, they will turn into a super armor that will give you enhanced abilities for a short while. There are a lot of reasons that Shatterhand shouldn’t exist. It was released too late in its console’s life. It was a remake of a Japanese licensed game. It bucks convention for the type of platform action game that it is. This is a game that should never have seen a North American release, and yet, here it is. Claiming its place as one of the Best Games. I hope you have, or have had, a good Thanksgiving. If you are American, and you have your Thanksgiving one week before Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever, what are you doing. Spread your family holidays out a bit. That’s just wacky.
I’m fighting a battle against pixels and I’m losing.
Maybe I’m winning. It’s hard to tell. My pixel art game project is sort of stuck, but the wheels are still spinning. This is the problem with working on something where you are going for an extremely specific look. You can get right up to the edge of that. You can have the look almost perfect, but if it’s not perfect it’s difficult to move forward. The pixel look I am going for is like 95% right now, and I think I probably need it around 97% or 98% before I can really let loose on the artwork. It doesn’t seem that much does it, that 2 or 3 percent. It’s almost nothing. I have done some work on the collision interactions and the animation pipeline. All of that is going fine. It’s drawing the pixels to the screen that need a tiny boost. I have a very promising filtering shader on the go. I have a camera adjustment script that keeps things from looking twitchy. Maybe, just maybe, one of those will be the solution to my problem. I literally have the shader open in another window while I type this and I keep jumping over there to make changes. I trust that I will be able to shove this project that extra 2 or 3 percent, but to do that I will need to get back to it. So I guess I will. |
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