So then, what the hell have i been doing all this time?
A fucking shit load that's what!
Most of my time has been taken with learning Adobe Illustrator. I know Photoshop pretty well but I really wanted a sharp, modern look to my art work. Photoshop art done right is stunning but I find it difficult to get crisp artwork our of it and I cant get the best out of the software. I chose to work in Illustrator because we decided that flash was the best way to go to learn game design and the 2 programs work well with each other.
The surprise pay off from choosing Illustrator to work in was that I work best when creating from scratch by hand and the live trace function in illustrator meant that I can do this easily and quickly. First of all I would draw characters by hand in pencil then I scanned the sketch into illustrator and I traced over the image to get an out line. I found that this took a while and wasn't as good as I felt I could do, so I focused on my hand drawn art work.
After sketching out a character I first of all used a black out line pen, then I'd draw a stylised out line to the image - A lot of you tube videos recommended that I 'inked' the sketch by tracing over it using a wacom, but wacoms cost bucks and I'm skint so I had to find another way. I found that I could 'ink' the image with a fine line pen and then scan that into Photoshop to tidy up and do some contrast adjustments before doing a live trace in Illustrator.
I'll have to change the way I draw and build images in illustrator to be able to animate in flash as the technique I mention above means that you cant isolate limbs and objects to animate in flash. its no biggy but one of the pitfalls of not being tutored is there's no one that can steer me back on track when I take a wrong turn. its all part of the learning process but annoyingly avoidable.
Anyway, next up is the web site, I'm looking forward to this as I can play with my new skills and it feels good as an artist to be able to do what I want! Art is my little corner of the project and although art is no where near as important to games as game play and mechanics I get a kick out of beautiful games. Limbo is a bench mark for me. Its stunning looking first and foremost but its more than that. The look and atmosphere of the game really strikes a chord with me and I hope to make someone "feel emotion" (yeah, I know how gay it sounds) while playing one of my games one day.
Ok, im going to go drink beer and fart man guffs onto ducks heads. Till next time douche bag...go thumb your own arsehole.
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