Tag: art

Hi, welcome back and here’s a low effort blog post for you because I haven’t managed a better one for too long.

I’ve had the hobby of developing my own video games for years now. I have started and abandoned a bunch of projects. But this time I’m the furthest I’ve ever been with a game.

So, I was looking for a background image for the game, to make the negative space in the game look more polished. The Internet nowadays sucks, you can’t find shit on Google, so I just browsed Reddit which is one of the few places left with reasonable human created content.

I found this image that I liked: https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/1bgspon/town_with_a_view/

And I posted a request to the PixelArt community asking whether someone can create a similar piece of art for me.

I got a ton of replies – looks like there are a lot of hungry artists out there looking for work. The prices for this kind of art ranged between $80 and $160.

Finally, the original author of the exact picture that I used as an example contacted me and asked if he can do it himself.

I was embarrassed – I could have just asked him first if he wanted to make a similar one for me, but instead went out looking for others.

So yeah, I did hire him in the end. And I am pleased with the result – it is pretty much what I envisioned for the game.

The final result for the art:

I have a note where I’ve written down a few ideas for blog posts. One of them is to draw a comic strip. I tried to do it for the current post. But the result was so atrocious that I decided against unleashing it on the Internet.

I have nearly zero experience drawing. But it is one of those skills I would like to acquire. I have watched a bunch of tutorial videos about it, but watching them won’t make me draw any better. Actually drawing, regularly, would though. The secret to learning how to draw (or many other skills) is just to practice a lot, so that your brain acquires new neuron connections which allow you to coordinate your imagination, eyes and hands in a better way.

These neuron connection pathways allow you to perform complicated tasks, if trained correctly. But they also determine your personality and your whole life. It is possible to retrain them, update the way your brain works, but it takes time and effort – regardless if you want to change some personality traits or learn how draw.

I’m having a hard time approaching the whole drawing thing. I’m setting myself really high expectations – I want to immediately be good at it, but the results are not so good. That’s probably a pretty common problem for people. If not immediately good at it – just give up.