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[tigris]

I will always talk about the elephant in the room.

tigris: Thank you!

NickyNyce: I definitely have! Be more adventurous with your interior design!

Well, this has been a fun trip down memory lane.

To be fair: I still draw elephants like that. That's one thing I haven't learned to do properly yet.

It's amusing that I still haven't made a game as high resolution as this one since.

Very much looking forward to this game!

I think faces are especially sensitive when it comes to making adjustments. It's very easy to make one that looks creepy or grotesque just because it's a little bit off.

Sadly, I have very few images that are a few years old, and certainly nothing THAT old. I'm a terrible archivist of my own work, and most of that stuff was hosted on image sites such as Imageshack which have been dead for years. People unfamiliar with my early work will just have to believe those of us that were there when we say that I was really very bad at drawing.

Thanks, Chris! I didn't really mean for that part to sound like 'this is how to show a big world', I really just meant it as 'I wanted a way to show more of the world than I usually could, and felt this helped me do it'. If it didn't give you the feeling of walking in a big world, that's just how it goes. Intent doesn't always translate well to the viewer, and I think it takes a lot more than a change in perspective to really accomplish a specific goal - this just nudged me a bit closer to getting there, perhaps.

If there's anything that'll make me groan in shame, it's "Bold statements I've made in the past", for sure.

Something that changed a lot of how I draw is the fact that I started doing art for other people. This made me work much harder to try and get things looking right. Particularly, almost all of the writers I've worked with have wanted to call into mind a world that is redolent of the world we know; that's something I very rarely cared much about in my own work. To represent reality, I made concessions in order to have my art better informed by reality.

Another thing it changed is that I draw a lot of scenery now. I used to make very small games, with the biggest having 15 scenes, and most having 10 or less. Now I work on games that have 60, 70, 80 backgrounds (Unavowed is probably going to be more than 100), and I draw a lot more scenery in a month as a result. When I was eyeballing things, it'd take me a long time to get stuff that "felt" right. Relying on a perspective grid speeds this process up, because my angles don't feel wrong due to the consistency. It's a simple fact that it's more economic to allow measurements to inform my judgement here, rather than having to work to get it right.

As for collaborating with other artists - I think that helps push one out of their comfort zone, definitely, or towards certain areas they'd never try normally. I haven't done it a lot, but what I have done has changed how I think about things.

In reading those old posts, there's still some stuff I agree with. Character scaling is a struggle (as you pointed out), and I still agree that to really get a game to look "right", things need to curve, slope, bend, twist, sag. I think Andail is better at doing this sort of thing than I am; my work tends to the naive whether I use perspective grids or not. If I'm using a perspective grid, I stick rigidly to that grid, and don't allow things to angle or curve much. If I shun the use of a grid, nothing converges much at all. Andail's work has curved roads and hills that I hope to be able to do myself some day, often without feeling like he's ignored realistic perspective to achieve those.

As for going back to earlier approaches, I've been working on a game of my own again, after a fair old time doing other people's games, and I've noticed that my approach to perspective has loosened a lot already in the few scenes I've painted and roughed out for it. Once more, I don't feel bound by reality anymore, and am not trying to create something that calls to mind the world we all know so much. In saying that, getting my roughs right has also been aided by my greater knowledge of perspective, and is allowing me to try compositions I didn't know how to approach properly before using vanishing points carefully for a couple of years.

Anyone that's been around here for a while has probably seen how much I've learned in the years I've been making games. Hopefully the next few years will show me learning just as much, and I'll regret all of these statements I've made today just as much.

Gosh, yes, absolutely. It's super, super hard to escape your own style. Every time you draw a stroke with a pencil that stroke is guided by years and years of practice and knowledge hidden in your brain that tells you how to draw that stroke. Ignoring all that subconscious knowledge isn't very easy; it's the well traveled path to an image that we hope will look good, and veering off that path is very hard when your goal is always hoping to make something that looks good.

That being said, I do think it's important to at least try to make changes, or additions, in your set of skills - not only to keep things different but also to keep things fresh and interesting, and to add knowledge to your skill set. Learning to draw a cartoony tree might give you more ideas to use for when you go back to drawing realistic trees, just as learning to draw realistic trees might give you more ideas for when you go back to drawing cartoony trees.

I think the main thing to remember is that there's a stage when working on every picture when problems arise. When we notice problems, we apply solutions to those problems to 'fix' the image. The solutions we choose will either come from experimentation, looking at the work of someone who has already solved those problems, or using the solution that worked for us in the past. Experimentation might lead to new, exciting solutions, as might looking at someone else's solutions, but following the solution that I already know and have practice with is usually my most common approach. That means that I'm solving problems in similar ways each time, and therefore incorporating similar elements.

This looks so good! Wonderful animations, so smooth, I love it!

I personally feel like I've betrayed both of us with this sudden and unforeseen action.

Spoiler

Thanks!

[close]

[Jack]

Gosh, many replies!

Jack: Thank you! I plan on doing, if not 'tutorials', at least more posts about art that might reveal some of the techniques and ideas I use when painting scenery.

gameboy: I think it's quite natural to wander away from very rigid perspective a little once you have a very good eye for it after doing it carefully for some time. I still don't have an excellent eye for it, so I'm still using grids carefully, but already I'm playing around with stepping away from them and seeing my results, now with slightly better judgement than I had before. The background artist I admire the most from the 90s, Peter Chan, is very good at freehand perspective that feels right and natural, without being rigid, and that's a style I hope to someday be able to mimic to some degree.

selmiak: It really depended, but sometimes in Technobabylon I definitely figured out the vanishing points in scenery and used them as a reference to add things. I agree that 1 point perspective makes it feel like you're in a streamlined, tunnel vision kind of shot, especially for interiors, and it does feel a bit like theatre. I was amusing myself recently at how our brain accepts that Ben and Maureen are facing each other here:



despite the fact that Ben is facing off to some unknown point to our left and Maureen is looking at his right ear (obviously this shot is 2 point perspective, not 1 point, but still relevant). It's reminiscent of seeing a play or musical or opera where the actors face the audience; unlike in film, we can't get the camera right in the shot so easily in this style, and so we make the actors face the audience so we can see their faces when they talk.

Amélie: Thank you! I think what I'm trying to do is to develop my skills and knowledge to a point at which I can do both as projects require it - I think the art that one produces should match the intent and vision of the writer when it comes to games, and that it's useful to be able to draw sharp, rigid perspective when trying to evoke a sense of a more real location (which I often try to offset/complement with my use of colours), and also useful to allow one's eye to have the final say when trying to evoke something more fantastic. Perhaps I could suggest that one's use of perspective is a means of actively suggesting reality or fantasy.

Cassiebsg: You're welcome, thank you for reading!

straydogstrut: Thank you! I have learned a lot, most definitely, and glad you enjoyed the read. I've enabled comments on the blog now, cheers!

Thanks, cat!

Yeah... I'm hoping to figure out where exactly the virus warnings are coming from. If I can do that, I'll be happy to restore some of the older stuff, once I've cleaned up the masses of spam in the comments.

Thanks for reading!

I recently cleaned up my old blog, getting rid of the old posts, and with them the spam, virus warnings and outdated stuff. Today I put up an essay I've been putting together about how I've changed my approach to using perspective when drawing background for games, and I figure some of you may be interested.

Here's the link to the post!

I have the same grin when I walk around with no pants on.

This looks cool, and I wanna play it!

Maybe something like this?

[I do whatever Ponch does. Signed up!]

I do whatever Ponch does. Signed up!

Love this.

I love Release Something! I never used to plan them, or anything, would just start a thread on a whim, and I'm pretty sure that's what everyone else who started them did, also. Would love to see another one!

I like them both, and prefer the second set!

Andail: would enjoy seeing.

Selmiak: I keep a premade perspective grid on a separate layer for me to refer to when I need a guide, like so: