Messages

31

break Room / Re: Am I A Natural Born Artist

« on: February 20, 2020, 03:08:22 PM »

Well it can't solve all of your problems, but you can't be born with a skill. That is a learned behavior. Some people may have a brain that makes it easier to learn. Essentially if you don't think you're skilled enough at drawing, then practice, study, take art classes. If you don't know how to solve an algebraic equation, looking at your ancestry won't change that, open the math book, take notes, learn and practice.

If you do any type of creative/problem solving work, the ability to draw is very useful. Architecture, Engineering, Fashion, even medical. Asking for a shortcut (to be born skilled) in a field where everyone else works hard is pointless. You won't stand out.

Let's just pretend like this isn't a flex. Look at the skill I was born with.

Spoiler

Now look 5 years later. I joined MR, got feedback, and bought drawing guide books.

Spoiler

Now another 5 years I can do this. I enrolled a college of visual arts, got Cs, and started as the worst artist in class, now I'm maybe average in terms of realism. (I stopped pursuing realism because it's kind of boring, like why not use a camera?)

Spoiler

I'm not saying that's a perfect photorealistic masterpiece. It was actually a last minute replacement for a different artwork that wasn't good enough to turn in for class. But it is something I wasn't capable of doing in 2010 because I didn't have any knowledge or training. (This piece actually got a very bad review because aside from it being realistic, it's really boring).

I've seen people develop in skill much faster than me. Like Suuper. I had a roommate who never drew anything before, decided to Major in architecture, and the major required him to take drawing classes. He learned very quickly and was able to do well in the class. I was slow because I never practiced, didn't listen to feedback, and wanted to draw from imagination.

32

break Room / Re: Am I A Natural Born Artist

« on: February 19, 2020, 09:50:19 PM »

Children born with Autism or OCD are often very good at making realistic art. Which is a big price to pay to be a "natural born artist". Practice and Talent both have the exact same result, but practice has more potential. You can't be a natural born doctor, you need to go to medical school like everyone else. The same is true for art, everyone needs to practice.

The problem with this whole discussion is you have to take a stance on what is "good art" in order to define a natural born artist. Obviously natural born artists should make "good art". And right now I feel like your stance is that realistic art is good art. It can be a very challenging type of art to make, but that doesn't make it great. Anime art is not realistic, yet it's still wildly popular. Even extreme abstractions like Shin-chan and One-piece, can produce a cult following.

Obviously it's not difficult to draw a shin-chan character, but does that make it bad even if it contributed to the Anime's success. Is money even a good metric of whether or not art is good? Is a paint splatter good art just because someone is willing to pay a million dollars for it, or does that specific millionaire just have bad taste?

Now it's kind of hypocritical for me to say this because I'm strongly against extremely abstract art, and I've personally committed to never watch one-piece purely because of the art style and the pirate theme. But I've also given up on My Hero Academia because of its awful "deus ex machina" at the beginning of the series, and the fact that it follows too many shounen tropes and ultimately reinvents Naruto.

Anime art takes the natural world and makes it aesthetically pleasing. Like how cartoons use bright colors and silly designs to keep children entertained. It ignores the obvious shape and structure of the human head on purpose. Not because they can't draw a realistic face, but even if they couldn't, they aren't trying to. Large eyes and small noses resemble the adorable faces of babies and children. And when anime wants to be serious and ugly the animators often choose to draw realistic anatomy.

My family does not make any art at all. It's not genetic except for the fact that usually right handed people prefer creative jobs and left handed people prefer STEM jobs. Because the creative brain controls the right hand and the logical brain controls the left hand. Which is a psychological theory that could be entirely false.

33

break Room / Re: Losing Interest

« on: February 13, 2020, 07:36:06 PM »

I don't know your specific situation but.

It's possible that you're losing interest in drawing because years of input from other people have caused to create art based on their standards rather than your own. It may be worth it to try making stylistic choices that you were afraid of before because of how it might be received.

Losing weight is a lifestyle change. It's like changing your religion. Not something you would do over "fashion". You would eventually get tired of it and be angrier at yourself because you didn't really have a compelling reason to do it in the first place.

But if you were really interested in fashion, you could get into creating fashion especially for people of your weight (which is clearly an untapped market if you're unsatisfied with it.) A black woman in the 1800s became a millionaire by marketing towards an untapped market (Madam C. J. Walker) and that was before the women's rights movement and the civil rights movement. But it is possible that amazon has already taken your market.

There are also many types of art you can try like metalsmithing and jewlery making, photography, fashion design. I would also suggest analyzing the things that inspired you before, why that's changed, and what could inspire you now. Things that you love, things that haven't been created yet, and things you wish there was more of.

34

break Room / Re: What if you died today?

« on: February 13, 2020, 07:22:33 PM »

Well the sad truth is you're completely incorrect. When you're dead it won't matter because you're dead. You're either not conscious or you have much bigger things to worry about in the afterlife. In fact that's one of the good thing about death is the absence of regret and fear and pain which makes it desirable for people who deal with a little too much of that.

You make it sound like death is just an out-of-body experience where you'll watch your corpse and think back on everything. Maybe it is, I'm not dead, so I can't say. But there is something applicable about the ideology that you could die tomorrow in terms of becoming more productive.

There is a psychological theory (I can't remember the name) that however much time you give yourself to do something, is the amount of time it will take you to do it. If that sounds confusing here's an example

If you give yourself 1 day to do something, you will do it in 1 day.
If you give yourself 1 year to do something, you will spend the whole year doing it even if you could've done it in one day.

Playing around with due dates could be a solution to increasing your productivity in life. I've even heard there are positive mental health benefits to making your bed every morning.

35

Manga Art Gallery / Re: Kesashi's Gallery

« on: February 10, 2020, 04:04:10 PM »

Yeah I build my PCs for developing games which means I usually have to go above the specs for gaming in terms of RAM and CPU. The first PC I used Unreal Engine on would freeze and crash a lot just due to the ram being too low.

This version doesn't have a lot of the basic things we take for granted in games like being able to change the controls because I just really wanted to have something tangible for the public. So for the next release I will be adding the compatibility options that are missing. So I'll release it much later.

36

Manga Art Gallery / Re: Kesashi's Gallery

« on: February 09, 2020, 05:21:15 PM »

naturally I instantly download.
stay tuned for a report :)

report: I cant play it.
-i click on IsabelRelease.exe
-screen goes black
-the title music starts playing (not every time though)
-screen goes back to normal but my mouse control is wacky (not every time though)
-I get these messages
some of the time:

every time:

-The program closes and my mouse returns to normal control.

(I have a decent PC but no dedicated graphics card)
(OS Win 7 64 Professional)

Based on the message, I assume it's trying to access a file that isn't bundled in the .rar?

This is one of the annoying things of programming - "It works fine on my PC but not on anyone else's"

This is actually really awesome to know. I'm sure a lot of people are having this issue and haven't told me. Some quick research I've found this error message can come up with PCs that have a graphics card but it is a graphics-card-related issue with the engine that I may be able to fix by distributing the game differently.

It's going to be hard for me to test personally because all my PCs have graphics cards. First world problems right. So I'm going to create a new build that isn't expecting you to have Directx11 or Directx12. It looks like there is an installer inside the download for the runtime files that you may be missing (I actually didn't realize that was there). It's kind of hidden in Izabel/Engine/Extras/Redist/en-us

37

Manga Art Gallery / Re: Kesashi's Gallery

« on: February 09, 2020, 03:07:27 AM »

Big news, a demo/prototype build of Izabel is available to download and play for free on the official website. This is just for testing purposes. Feel free to let me know if you find crazy bugs in it, or also how you feel about the game and its potential.

https://www.playizabel.com/download.html

38

Manga Art Gallery / Re: Kesashi's Gallery

« on: February 04, 2020, 05:34:09 PM »

I'm going to be making some radical changes to Blade Regalia. I want to focus on what makes Blade Regalia special and emphasize what most people probably imagined when they first learned about it. The idea of weaponized clothing is what I believed made Blade Regalia what it is, but I may have abandoned that for the more "safe" state that it's in now. Right now it's just fancy clothing with medieval fantasy combat, which could be interesting if I pushed my skills with fashion design further, but raw fashion design has never been my goal.

Essentially I want the vision for the project to focus on the idea of clothing as a weapon. For example: rather than having a dress and a sword, the dress is the sword. It's not ideal to make changes like this 3 years into the project, but I know if I don't make this change now I'll regret it in the future. For the most part this is a visual/lore change and not a game design change. The game is already built to make replacing assets easy, so it isn't much of a setback in terms of the prototype.

This vector drawing was done for a class. (No prompt). I didn't end up showing it, I showed a different piece. This is a picture of a character named Daniela (in blade regalia). I've drawn her a few times. She deals with a lot of self-loathing which may seem ironic because she uses a mirror was a weapon.

39

Manga Art Gallery / Re: Suuper's manga (+digital and 3D)

« on: January 23, 2020, 02:56:03 PM »

Well tracing isn't actually bad in terms of art. Before cameras were invented, it was common for artists to use the camera obscura technique to project an image onto a wall and then trace it. It would make photorealistic painting much easier. It's actually only very recently that the art world has started to care more about process than results. The entire concept was started by a movement in the 1900s.

I think it's pretty insane how smooth those lines are without being done in a vector program. I think there are some qualities in Uniicake's artsyle that might benefit you to emulate.

At this point you may be reaching a crossroads where your skill with realism is contradicting your stylistic sensibilities. Like with the latest piece, if you took the outlines out that would be some extremely realistic clothing. I think you should consider trying more traditional anime cel shading and larger outlines similar to how Uniicake uses her large outlines to make the characters more cartoony.

40

Manga Art Gallery / Re: Suuper's manga (+digital and 3D)

« on: January 19, 2020, 07:38:41 PM »

Well your work ethic is ideal for manga art production considering how demanding it is. You are making progress, but an important thing to consider are the standards you're shooting for. Because you're mastering the art of your own style.

There may be a lot you can learn from imitating other styles, as you said you've been looking at other artists. I hate to suggest that because I hate it when they give those kinds of assignments in my classes. So multiple times I've been given the assignment to copy a "masterwork" from an established/famous artist, and I personally can't stand it.

I bring this up because I've dealt with a lot of critiques of my work over the years, and from someone who doesn't really understand how art is made will critique it based on their desired style, rather than critiquing it based on your desired style.

You could say "I wish this sketch here was colored". But obviously your goal was to draw a pretty girl, in black and white focusing on form and line and fabric and beauty etc. That's sort of an extreme example, but with people who understand art a little better understand their biases are specific to them.

I bring this up because when people impose their ideals onto you work you can start to produce work that's based on their ideals instead of your own. Typically this results in you being very dissatisfied with your work and probably art in general, but it does also result in some major growth. Because once you retake your art with your own stylistic approach, you'll have a much more full perspective of your style.

Leonardo Da Vinci has some approaches to using dry media that I'll never really agree with, but at the same time I did find myself emulating some of his approaches that I really liked. And it really helped me with my realistic work.

I think you might be hitting a wall less because you want your skill to develop and more because you want your style to develop. I personally spend most of my time looking at other people's work. The more diverse the work is that you expose yourself to, the better. My professors say all the time that we need to "steal" from other artists in a sense: capturing our favorite elements from their work and applying it to the context of our style.

If I were you, I would aim towards producing something like a manga. I love to just draw portraits and portraits and portraits but as I develop these characters, the characters demand to express themselves and to be seen interacting in specific locations and telling their story etc. So you have this mountain of practice, but not necessarily product that you're practicing for. Which could be a full body portrait, like you're doing, but it could go farther, like the work you did for your free requests board. It could also be good to see what fruit your practice produces to see where your practice could be lacking, and it would be better because you would see exactly what you need, instead of wasting time learning things that won't be relevant to you.

41

Manga Art Gallery / Re: Kesashi's Gallery

« on: January 19, 2020, 01:42:08 PM »

Well I'm back in class for my last year, and now I have 3 open-ended painting classes. I decided to buy a gigantic canvas. 40 x 60 inches (1m x 1.5m). I'm interested in doing scenes with multiple figures, so naturally I thought that may be easier with a larger canvas.

In Blade Regalia, I'm still gradually build up characters. There are some characters that haven't been fully designed yet, but may be better fit for the prototype. For instance, I'm avoiding characters who use pets or have any transformation ability because that could double the workload regarding modeling and animating multiple bodies for a single character. A lot of characters are getting long awaited updates to their design.

Svetlana


Sabrina


Moline




Samantha


Behemoth

42

Manga Art Gallery / Re: Kesashi's Gallery

« on: December 31, 2019, 02:54:43 PM »

I will definitely keep you in mind.

My Ai actually follows a single invisible entity called the "Team Actor". The team actor can walk towards the objective and the AI can choose to follow it, go on flank routes or take the high ground individually. The team actor allows them to make decisions as a team and as an individual.

43

Manga Art Gallery / Re: Kesashi's Gallery

« on: December 29, 2019, 02:43:45 PM »

make the AI more intelligent

That's probably not as easy as it sounds :P

Well it gets complicated because I want their intelligence to be fluid. So you could have archers with better aim than other archers. I'll cover this stuff when I do a "State of the game" update. But you will have at least 3 AI teammates against 4 AI enemies, and so you'll be able to control your AI, like setting their priorities to survival or healing or attacking, and you'll be able to level up their intelligence.

The major problem I have is there aren't really any games out there like Blade Regalia, I know that sounds arrogant because it could easily fit into the Hero Shooter realm and I'm sure that if it got popular, the first thing news outlets and youtubers would do is call it an overwatch clone.

If I were creating overwatch then it would be easier to understand how the AI should act, but blade regalia has a central emphasis on melee combat and just a handful of characters who shoot or fight at range. This means it's most similar to failed hero shooter, Gigantic, in fact that game was the inspiration for the current combat system because they solved a lot of problems I was having with team-based melee combat.

However, Gigantic's gameplay and metagame involved multiple objectives which revolve around dealing damage, like a classical moba where you have 3 lanes to attack and multiple structures to destroy.

So as a result I have been working towards public testing so hopefully I can use actual human beings to give me some insights into how AI should act.

44

Manga Art Gallery / Re: Kesashi's Gallery

« on: December 23, 2019, 07:45:59 PM »

Lots of little updates. Haven't been working in backgrounds again yet, but I will be soon. I will be developing an expansion to the game to allow you to play any character as male or female. I've also been making a lot of progress in the singleplayer game. Current goal is to finish a few more characters and make the AI more intelligent. The way the characters are built now makes character customization very intuitive. I've been thinking about implementing it for the heck of it. And a couple new characters. I've been behind on art for the Lotus factions for a while, so I'm working to catch up on them now primarily.





Aiko


Phaelyn


Aurora


Vakram "The Dirty Scarab"

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Manga Art Gallery / Re: Kesashi's Gallery

« on: November 23, 2019, 01:18:01 PM »

We have achieved backgrounds. I've got a few more scenes I'm working on after this. I think there's always room to improve my color-picking for atmospheric perspective, but I'm ready to move on.