AuthorTopic: Winning at pixel art  (Read 13183 times)

Offline NowvaB

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Re: Winning at pixel art

Reply #30 on: March 30, 2015, 08:18:21 pm
* What Vagrant said *
Selfishness? to me that just looks like you described motivation.  :lol:


As for me...

I started Pixel Art so I could create art for the games I planned on making before reality hit me.(making games is hard)
But as someone who loves the classics and can't draw it eventually grew into a hobby and now I can't stop.

Yes, I love competition and No, I don't like losing but that's fine because I usually only compete with friends.

As of now, I make art because I can produce it to the point where it looks attractive and I find joy in being able to produce things I never thought I would be able to. My motivation to make art is "this is gonna look really cool when it's done!". Of course when I would post something online I never felt like it got the recognition it deserved. I was thinking how a improperly scaled JPEG of a stolen drawing of a furry listed under pixel art (I'm looking at you Deviant Art!) could best my amazing interpretation of bla.bla.bla. anyways what I'm saying is that it's a serious mood killer when things like that happen and I feel your pain.

To conclude my rambling I'll say that winning at pixel art to me is getting the recognition you deserve as an equal to the amount of effort you put in. or I guess if your happy with how you are now, that's cool too.
[never really thought about this my thoughts may change.]

Offline astraldata

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Re: Winning at pixel art

Reply #31 on: March 31, 2015, 12:34:58 am
Not really one to chime in on stuff like this since a lot of what I'd have to say has already been said a lot better than how I might put it, but I thought it might be nice to try and talk out how I look at "winning" in pixel art since it's not something I've thought a lot about before -- So here goes:

When I first came to Pixelation way back in the day, I barely even knew how to draw. I saw some of the old pros on here back then and gawked at how awesome their stuff was. Comparing myself to them, I couldn't even begin to imagine how I could /ever/ get from where I was then to where I am now skill-wise. I had no sense of color, no sense of design, composition -- nothing at all -- and I wanted to, somehow, make a game despite all of that, and I wanted its art to look as good as the pros'. Looking back at myself then, and where I am now, I now can say that doing pixel art actually taught me something even more important than how to do pixel art professionally -- it taught me how to approach art.

I wasn't out to one-up anyone (I didn't have the skills back then for that), but I did appreciate a good challenge, and the most challenging thing in pixel art to me at the time (I thought) was animation, so Pixelation's weekly animation challenges were a sure-fire way to improve my skills in pixel art all-around -- or at least teach me that I wasn't cut out for pixel art to begin with so that I could give up early at least. After all, if I couldn't make decent pixel art and animations, I couldn't make a pixel-art-based game.

Thanks to Pixelation though, I got better, and I got better quickly. Most of that progress came from others' who were struggling and posting their art despite their struggling. That's why, as a skilled artist now, I owe a lot to the community for making mistakes and posting them here so that I could learn alongside the original posters, without having to make those same mistakes myself.

I shorted myself a lot of experience by doing so though -- so, fortunately, I made up for that by doing a lot of edits.

When Pixelation disappeared for a while, I really thought it was gone for good, and my opportunity to give back along with it. So, when it came back, I vowed to learn from here onward by helping others (rather than simply lurking), and that has helped me grow a ton more than I thought I could ever grow.

To learn a skill as well as you can learn it -- try teaching it to others! That, imo, is truly winning at that skill -- be it pixel art or otherwise -- and, since every form of art you become skilled at (including music) can inform skills in other forms of art (including visual design), you never go wrong in learning art, despite whether or not your interests may change to another form of art down the road. I started learning pixel art (and art) to make a game -- but, in the end, it taught me everything I needed to know about art in general.

In a lot of ways, it's because of this fact that art is, indeed, about the journey, and not the destination, as I had once assumed.

You won't care about that at first, since all you'll care about is learning tools and techniques to accomplish your goals, but the more techniques you learn, the more in touch you'll be with art itself because you get freer and freer to express yourself when you don't have to think about techniques or their execution anymore, and with that comes the true fun and what makes art so great (and also so miserable to the beginner!)

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 To touch on recognition:
--------------------------------
I know this may sound weird, but I don't need recognition for my art at all -- instead, I am personally out for the satisfaction that I have the requisite artistic skills to make any kind of game/assets/designs I want or need -- entirely on my own -- if I so desire. To be able to do that, I feel I'd have exactly the level of skills I'd be satisfied with. To me, that matters most of all -- way above anyone else's opinion of me or my artwork.

At one point, I definitely used to seek recognition, but I realized that desire most likely arose from showing my family/friends my poorly-drawn pictures as a child, and being rewarded with high praise for them. It boosted my confidence enough to keep me drawing for years, but when I got on the internet, my ego was quickly bruised. There were literally tens of thousands, if not millions, of average people out there who could draw at least a hundred times -- or more -- 'better' than me.

I could either improve -- or give up as an artist -- along with giving up all those years I sunk into it -- and, thanks to that praise I received as a kid, I built up enough years to decide it was still worth it to at least push on through for a while in order to see just how far off I really was.

That being said, when I discovered I could make games with pixel art, I decided I really had a reason to improve my art skills. Like everyone else, I thought pixel art looked easy enough to pick up in a few weeks. I quickly learned just how hard a skill it really was.

Thankfully though, I came across Pixelation. Despite my struggles with pixel art at first, because I've mastered it enough to be very comfortable with it in any context, I've branched out into other areas like Digital Painting and Traditional Animation -- both of which I've always loved and wanted to learn how to do, and with the skills from pixel art, I now feel confident enough to do them. To me, that's truly "winning" at pixel art.

When I master those, I'll really be satisfied with my skill level. I'll truly be able to create any kind of art I'd ever want to make. That kind of artistic freedom, and the prospect of it truly being attainable in one lifetime to someone like me is (to me) exactly the prospect that I was looking for as a child when I first picked up that pencil and started drawing all those years ago. :)
I'm offering free pixel-art mentorship for promising pixel artists. For details, click here.

     http://mugenzero.userboard.net/

Offline cels

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Re: Winning at pixel art

Reply #32 on: April 02, 2015, 01:49:27 pm
Some really great perspectives here. Just want to thank everyone again for posting their views. I'm not looking to start a big discussion, because ultimately attitudes are so personal and I'm not sure if there's a right or wrong. But it's really cool to hear how other people think about these things. Especially experienced artists.