Help Learning to Draw?

[Guybrush Nosehair]

Here's my situation. I have absolutely no background in drawing and don't know even the simplest techniques. I would like to learn to do pixel art so that I can become a background/sprite artist. At the moment, I am equipped with the original Photoshop CS and Deluxe Paint II and IV.

Can anyone recommend any sources for learning? Also, do I need to learn with a pencil and paper, or can I jump right into using a computer?

[Anian]

1. Oh, wow, that's a big can of worms.

There's no real begining other than getting a book on how to draw and practice practice practice.
If you want a quick recap of some stuff, mainly comics - then you can try stuff like this http://www.amazon.com/How-Draw-Comics-Marvel-Way/dp/0671530771 (it really does a good recap of the fun stuff) or just go to your local library and look for books on drawing.

Most of the time you'll need to learn the basics (learn anatomy and how stuff and people in real world actually can be composed out of simple geometric shapes), then you'll probably learn realistic (actually try matching what you see with what you can draw as closely as you can) and then you can go to "simpler" (more abstract) stuff like pixel drawing. It's harder to make one line that shows a lot, than a lot of lines.

While you're learning, find your favourite artists and influences (comics you like to read, book covers, movie posters, paintings, adventure games, cartoons, whatever you've seen around you and liked) and try to copy that, eventually your style will become a blend of your very own. Try to find maybe books of their art and copy stuff, try to imitate, look how they shade, how they draw anatomy, take what you like and modify to your skills and needs.
Oh, and don't be afraid to use refferences, hell, even greatest artists in history used models, you have internet full of pictures to use, take advantage of it.

2. even if you get real good art drawing, you'll still probably preffer to draw on paper before you go pixel drawing, especially if you don't have a pen tablet.

[veryweirdguy]

Draw from life. A lot. Both for people and landscapes.

Carry a sketchbook and draw things you see around you.

[Babar]

If your goal is pixel art for a game, then I don't really think an intermediate step of learning sketching is really necessary, although I suppose observing and attempting to copy down stuff you see in real life could be helpful.
You could still learn the stuff about proportion, anatomy, perspective, colours, etc. from those books, although if you ask me, that stuff is all available on the internet anyway (perhaps more difficult to find or more difficult to read, though).

Specifically for pixel art, the stuff here by MrColossal is very helpful:
http://kafkaskoffee.com/tutorials.shtml

The thread here might also be very helpful (although it contains some deadish links):
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=32133.0

While it's probably a very simplistic view to take, and I may be being overly technical at a very "theoretical" stage of your problem, but you really only have to remember a couple of "rules" to start out (such as 7.5 heads proportion for sprites, using a vanishing point on a horizon line for backgrounds, getting your lighting and colours down etc), and from then forward, you just need to keep practicing.

[Guybrush Nosehair]

I've done a black paintover outline of Indiana Jones's head (real original, huh) so that I can get an idea of how everything's done. I'm rather impressed with how it came out. Now that I've done this, how do I decide which colors are best to add to the gradient, and how do I create a splatter gradient? I'm using Photoshop CS.

[SpacePirateCaine]

Hi Grim - It's always good to see someone with motivation to expand their horizons.

The first thing I'd like to say is that everyone here has given great advice. The truth is that everyone enters art from different angles and as long as the end result is good, everyone's happy. That said, I'd say that what you should focus on is primarily based on what you want to do. As you said you want to do pixel art specifically, I have a few suggestions that might help. I, personally, have always been a 'sprite' guy. I've been working lately on my backgrounds, and hypocritically give out plenty of advice on backgrounds, but architecture in particular is one of my weak points so take my advice on backgrounds with a grain of salt.

For working on sprites, I got my start from the very same pixel art tutorial that Babar linked above. MrColossal is one of the great pixel artists of our community and has a lot of extremely useful advice that's easy to understand and implement. The truth is, you don't really honestly need a great classically trained background when going into character sprites in low-res. The higher resolution, the more classic technique is going to be important. It certainly helps to understand the 'eight heads rule' for creating characters of varying levels of cartooniness and it never, ever hurts to know how the masters have always done it, but if you want to start off with low-res sprites that have semi-realistic proportions, I'd certainly suggest doing low resolution photo traces. Take an image, resize it to the size of the sprite you want then paint over it with pixels - and no cheating!

Once you've done this a few times, you really start to understand how to best work on small scale and how to trick the eye into seeing things a certain way. After you've done that, you can also start working on limiting your palette and really start developing your own pesonal technique. At that size, it's not as much how realistic your proportions are, it's how realistic you can make them seem to be.

Now, to contradict myself, I'd suggest that for backgrounds, it's much harder to find a way out of doing classical research. Some members of the forum recoil in terror and hiss and gnash their collective teeth at the prospect, but I am a firm believer in understanding and making prodigious use of linear perspective - single, dual and triple point perspectives can really help you understand architecture. When it comes to coloring and shading and so on, though, that's where I start to run out of patience. So don't listen to me - listen to the people I listen to.

A while back, fellow forum-goer abstauber created a MAGS game with some great background art, and did the community a great service by offering a tutorial about how they did it. That can be found here. Look it over and I'm sure you'll find some inspiration.

Finally, learn by studying! I'd suggest you spend some time just browsing the archives of PixelJoint and look through some of the threads at the Pixelation forums for inspiration. And never be afraid to post on the Critic's lounge right here!

Lastly - an artist is only as good as their tools. The funny thing is that Photoshop, while a great high-resolution art tool, is not the ideal tool for pixel art. I'd suggest trying out GraphicsGale (my weapon of choice) or any of the other low-resolution art tools developed specifically for pixel art out there. They have a number of tools that are unavailable or much less intuitive than the larger art suites, as well as being geared toward animation, which is something you will, I hope, be planning on working on in the future.

[Dualnames]

Perspective. The rest will fall in place.

[Jim Reed]

What they say is good advice, and to chip in myself, I would recommend to learn how to draw simple shapes (cubes, cylinders and pyramids -balls are easy) in perspective (1, 2 and 3 point perspectives). Most of the things you can see can be broken down into these simple shapes. So if you can accurately draw shapes, you can build stuff from them. That will make your drawings look correct. As for coloring and texturing stuff, I'm not really good at that so I will not give advice.
Learning how to draw is one long process, so please have patience and practice a lot.

[Ghost]

I often find that traditional drawing and pixel art demand very different skills, and while it's possible to transfer knowledge, simple and even "medium class" spritework (like low-res characters) depend a lot on reducing and exaggerating. One frikking pixel can change a face a lot if you need to fit it into a 5x5 grid!

One very great article I recently found deals with sprite animation and appeal, and can be found here at Art-Eater. Good read with plenty of images to show off the awesomeness.

Apart from that: Google for sprites, and see how they are made. Maybe recreate a few. Settle for a style- I think that's the most important part. Low-res and high-res spriting is a very different can of worms. Get references and play around. And lots'n'lots of fun!