Learning to Art

I’ve been pretty creative for a long time - some of my earliest memories are making terrible skits with my siblings using an old camcorder. I learned sewing to make tiny stuffed animals [protip: socks are already body shaped] and made a stuffed green cube named Spencer which in retrospect was an OC for “Kids Tetris” (1999)

I got into digital art around 2016. Back when twitter was cool, I followed a bunch of game designers and pixel artists. Inspired by them I tried my hand at pixel art

This was the first pixel art I made. [I lost the original so I had to yoink from twitter] I ripped the style from an artist on twitter [slynyrd]

These are some more earlier ones I made.

I used pyxeledit for most of the art at this time.

These are some more I made around early 2018. I lost most of them because I had a different computer then and didn’t back up [will add more if I ever find it again]

My brother was a lot better at pixel art than me. He did 5 months of a pixel-art-a-day challenge and would make sprites for games I was working on

The early 3D period

It was around this time I started getting into 3D art. I found blender thru twitter artists and figured I’d try to use it.

A lovecraft Migo and a rough sketch I based it on

Looking at them now, it’s clear there was a lot of room for improvement, but I enjoyed making things and didn’t really care how bad they were, just that I made them.

A lot of the early stuff from this time is rough (taking screenshots from blender is bad enough), but with time I learned more and experimented.

I branched out from simple models to try more advanced things - modelling an SR-71, pilots; the doom 2 revanant. Simple scenes

Finally learned about blender’s rendering

As I kept at it, I started making more intricate scenes with many models

At this stage in my art journey, I was scared of textures. UV unwrapping was hard and added another layer to an already new process. I stuck to vertex colors and flat shading. It wasn’t the best looking per se, but it confined me, letting me focus on modelling skills and not overwhelming

To prove my point - here’s what my texturing skill looked like back then

So I made a bunch more things. Slowly building up my skill and confidence. It’s a really fun feeling to make something. Start with the blender box, delete it, then build a whole world that didn’t exist.

Making scenes was fun - lot’s of robots. That’s probably because I was only good enough to model low poly stuff (and robots are cool)

More figures I made from that time period. At this time, I found modelling existing things was a fun way to challenge myself. This was my attempt at Bender from Futurama, The Summerween Trickers from Gravity Falls, the final boss from Steamworld Dig, and the revenant from Doom 2

A robot I made - by this time I understood blender rigging enough to add actuating pistons.

Surrealist phase

It’s fun to make weird stuff

Better modelling

As time went on, I got better at making things. Still too intimidated to add textures, but was getting the hang of low poly modelling and using rigging to pose. Lot so aliens from this time

Pixels return

Around this time I started getting comfortable using textures in my models. From playing quake, I was emboldened to start using low res pixel textures to add more detail to my modelling. Quake did a trick where the model had a front and back and the texture was flat.

This proved to be an easy enough way to make characters

Almost all my characters are done using the same base mesh based on quake’s ranger. It allows making a new character to be as easy as retexturing

A collections of many characters built using the same basic template.

Now that characters were handled, I started making textures for scenery. This was done using 32x32 textures and using triplanar mapping to add it to models

Having a big library of textures to pull from is really helpful because any time I need bricks or metal, I can just take it from the library.

Models for games

These are screenshots from opengl games I was working on (and never finished).

Wanted to expand my game making from 3D tech demos to something more game-y, I switched to start using unity.

Now?

Currently, I’m just making small scenes in blender when I get an oppurtunity. It’s not much, but looking back, it’s fun to see the journey I took to where I am

My First Homemade 3D Engine