Thursday, February 14, 2019

graphics - How can a programmer learn to draw 2D assets?



Are there any good tutorials for someone who wants to create 2D graphical game assets? Drawing classes for absolute beginners, preferably teaching skills that can be as relevant as possible to games - drawing characters sideways/top-down, isometric, drawing textures and such.




Answer



First, you want to search for tutorials on the internet. Youtube is your friend. Seriously, it's probably the best way to learn drawing. It's easy to look at some really amazing drawing and say "oh, I could never do that, he's been doing that since he was a kid." But when someone slowly walks you through the steps and explains every part of the way, the mountain suddenly seems a lot easier to climb.


Next the problem is figuring out what to search for. You don't want to start off with the hard stuff, so don't go searching for "digital art" or "character design" as you will be lost very fast. There's a lot of tutorials out there that start off like "first draw a basic human figure" or "start by sketching out some buildings". Avoid those.


Now, a tutorial to get you started. First, search YouTube for "perspective drawing". It's a basic skill that's the first thing they teach you in any art class. Play around with this a bit, drawing 3D houses, etc. Now, try to find something in your house that's roughly box-shaped. Your speakers or desktop should work fine. Now draw it using perspective. What you just did is called "life drawing" which is basically where you draw something from real life. It's really important that you do this, because you figure out neat little things on your own when you draw real things.
Eventually, you'll get to the point where you can look at something and start thinking "how would I draw this?" That's important, because then when you need to draw, say, a potion for a game, you can look at a glass bottle and think about how to draw it, then apply that to your potion. Think of it like writing a "method" for drawing a bottle. You'd probably start out with a method called "DrawLine", use it for "DrawCylinder", then make "ShadeGlass" and combine "ShadeGlass" with "DrawCylinder" to get "DrawBottle".


Also, when you watch a tutorial you'll see that a lot of what you drew looks a lot messier or uglier than what you saw in the tutorial. Do not be worried, it's not that you're less creative or that you didn't follow the tutorial, you just haven't built up some of the basic skills that the artists in the tutorials have. An easy way to help this is to just draw lots of basic shapes over and over again. Keep a pad of paper next to you while watching tv, and during the commercial break see if you can draw 20 circles, lines, or squares. Think of it like learning the basic methods in a new language so that you don't have to look through pages of the documentation.


Another thing to watch out for is details. Say you're drawing a person. You decide to start with the head. So you start with drawing a circle. Then you think "oh, I've already got the circle, I'll give it eyes and a mouth!" Next thing you know, you've got a pretty good head, with hair, a nose, eyes, a mouth, ears, etc. So you start drawing the body. After doing some pretty good shoes and maybe a cool shoulder armor you realize that your drawing looks horrible. The head is too big, the legs are different sizes, and the feet look backwards. My point is that you have to focus on big shapes and try to resist the urge to start adding details.


Finally, learn to critique your own drawings. Don't just look at the person you drew and say "that's ugly". Pick out specific things to improve upon. Say "those hands could be better" or "the proportions seem kinda weird" or "The hair looks too fuzzy". Then look up tutorials for whatever you need to improve on. There's a lot of good resources out there, but you have to know what you are looking for. You wouldn't just search for "Making my program faster", you would look up "improving performance rendering triangle strips in XNA".


Anyways, assuming you already did perspective drawing, here's some things to search for to get stated. (inserting "tutorial" after all of these can give better results)




  • 3D shading

  • Figure drawing

  • Gesture drawing

  • Basic Pixel Art


Just with that stuff you should have a good month or two of stuff to practice. Try to keep sketchbooks, so that you can look back and see how much you've improved. If you want to look forward and see how good you can get, look up "speed painting" on YouTube. And if you are getting frustrated with all sorts of technical details and stuff, watch this video and try to have some fun.


Good luck, and make sure you draw often!


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