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[danlthemanl]

I can't make art. I've tried, I find myself not being able to make my games because of my lack of art! I don't want to use public domain assets because someone else might be using them and it might look like I'm copying them. I've tried 2D, 3D (waay to hard), I can't do it! Please help 

[J. R. Hill]

I can't make art. I've tried

Try again.
 

[Kramlack]

Try again.

This. Trust me, it's all about practice and patience. I've had days (even weeks) where I can't make anything and I literally want to just kill myself. Other days have just been wonderful to me, and I can really get some hot stuff out.

EDIT: Post WIP's or stuff you've done and get help from the community, that's what we're here for.

[jwk5]

If you have to, start with stick figures and ugly scribbles if it at least puts your ideas to paper (or pixel). Drawings are merely icons for an idea or an expression. A stick figure horse and a photo-realistic drawing of a horse are still both just icons expressing the idea of "horse".

A lot of times when I am drafting up ideas if I haven't yet studied something (like a certain kind of tree or such) but I want to use it in a drawing I will just scribble out a crappy guess (to serve as a placeholder) and then come back to it later once I got reference on hand. It allows me to fully lay out the blueprints for a drawing without breaking my rhythm and getting caught up in the specifics.

For the actual process of learning, don't tell yourself "I can't draw!" or you will likely never learn to. Say "I don't know how to" if you must, but not "I can't". You should also be specific about it. "I don't know how to draw" is too general of a problem for you to realistically fix, but "I don't know how to draw ninjas" is a specific problem you can actually plan to fix.

If you wanted to learn how to draw a ninja, for example, then you know you need to learn how to draw a person first since a ninja is a person (in costume). To draw a person, you would need to know how to draw a face, arms, legs, etc. so you would need to pick one to start with. Let's say you want to first learn to draw a face, you know then that you need to learn to draw eyes, noses, ears, mouths, etc. so again you pick one.

Once you learn to draw a good mouth, you can move on to good eyes, good noses etc. until you are drawing good faces, and from faces you move on to arms, legs, etc. until you draw good figures in general. From there you learn to draw ninja costumes, ninja weapons, etc. and pretty soon you draw good ninjas.

With almost anything you intend to draw keep narrowing it down to its core elements and from there you will find a much easier point to learn from. It is all icons representing things. Break big icons down to the smallest icons and you can develop the smallest icons into really good looking big icons.

The other thing that helps is to actually study what you are trying to draw (not necessarily by reading about it, but even just by looking at it). Icons are representations of what you know, so the better you know something the easier it is going to be for you to create a representation of it.

That's about all the general advice I can think of off the top of my head. Just look, learn, practice, and don't frustrate yourself with overwhelmingly high self-expectations. Some things will take ages for you to learn to draw, some will come to you like second nature.

[Razz]

Art is kinda like music, IMO. It's not really something you can understand until you've had experience making it, as stupid and unhelpful as that sounds... Just make art! Don't worry if it sucks.

I think the best way I can explain it, is to compare it to whistling or snapping your fingers ... a lot of people don't know how, despite being told how to do it their entire life, mainly because they didn't try hard enough and/or didn't persist. Art is the same way.

[Scut Fabulous]

Think laterally!  If you can't go through the front gate, be sneaky and find a different route.   

Look at this game:
http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/12/freeware_game_pick_platformerm.html
It has the least art assets since pong and still looks great!

How about this idea (because it's something I've been dying to try):  Get a digital camera, y'know those things that cost nothing and are everywhere, film you and your friends in front of a green or blue sheet, trace over the frames in ms paint.  Rotoscoping a la Prince of Persia! 

[Squiggly_P]

Don't even need the sheet. The guy filmed his brother jumping around in a parking lot and climbing on dumpsters and stuff to get the footage for that game.

[jwk5]

One of the methods I started with (prior to learning more about gesture sketching, etc.) that was fairly easy to pick up on was like so:

It is quick and easy and gives you generally acceptable results. Learning about gesture sketching and such will definitely help you out in the long run, but in the beginning I recommend just sticking to simple easy-to-understand methods that help you get comfortable with drawing quickly. That and copy the shit out of your favorite artists, draw random objects you see, etc. Your own observance is your most powerful drawing tool.

[Scut Fabulous]

Don't even need the sheet. The guy filmed his brother jumping around in a parking lot and climbing on dumpsters and stuff to get the footage for that game.

Oh that's badass, now I'm even more stoked to try it.   

[iffi]

Just keep drawing, and keep this in mind: no matter how bad it gets, it's still better than my attempts at drawing.

[ink.inc]

Just keep on doing it, man. You can improve your skills so quickly if you really put your head to it. In the span of one month, I went from this:

to this:

and this:

(this last piece was edited by rostiger)

I'm an engineering major, mind you; I only started to do pixel work a year ago, and I only started to draw a year before that. Just hang out in the Art forums and folks will generally give you some feedback. You'd be surprised how fast you can develop.

[s0]

I agree with what everyone else has said, but I think it has a lot to do with your attitude as well. If you don't really enjoy drawing (or whatever) on its own and just do it in "utilitarian" way for your games (like me), you'll probably be a lot slower to improve.

[Chris Whitman]

As another piece of advice: watch people drawing/painting/whatever as much as possible. There're a lot of processes and techniques that go into constructing a piece of art, and if you have to discover them for yourself, it's going to take a very long time.

When I first started getting into making art in Photoshop, I watched many, many hours of YouTube speedpaints and Gnomon Workshop videos. Being able to see how professionals construct art and overcome particular challenges will really help you.

Also, do whatever kind of art you actually want to do. Like, I can do vector art and digital painting competently, but I am rubbish with a pencil. For years I had convinced myself I had no artistic ability, because I couldn't sketch worth a damn, and I was under the impression that you had to "begin from sketching." To this day if you hand me a pencil, I can barely draw a stick figure, but I can render objects convincingly in Painter or Photoshop.

Cross-training for art is great, and you can pick up lots of different techniques and abilities from focusing on different media, but ultimately you are going to progress a lot faster and feel more motivated if you spend your time making the kind of art you want to make. If you try to force yourself to practice something you don't want to do, you are just going to get frustrated and quit.

[Chris Whitman]

Parenthetically, I'm not the world's greatest artist by any stretch of the imagination, and there are a lot of ways in which practicing with natural media or learning more about anatomy and proportion could really help hone my art skills. What I'm saying is that it didn't turn out to be remotely necessary to be able to convincingly render with a number 2 pencil the objects that were sitting on my desk in order to do what I wanted to do. I still wound up relatively competent at making game assets just from sitting down and making game assets (I've done a handfull of non-game paintings when I felt like it, but I've never stressed out about practising that).

What really helped me was learning the process, and taking the time to sit down and paint correctly instead of rushing something off because it was easier.

[r.kachowski]

In the span of one month, I went from this:

pretty cool

to this:

awesome

I only started to do pixel work a year ago, and I only started to draw a year before that.

That's pretty interesting dude, do you have anything from when you were just starting out drawing?

One of my problems is I have stupid high standards, so whenever I start drawing something I get annoyed because it isn't immediately perfect in every way. I'd like to aim lower, but one of the things that put me off drawing was being forced to draw apples and still life continuously in school. I guess I don't understand the process of drawing well enough to see where it starts (and I have no interest in drawing fruit).

It'd be cool to see how someone else approached it.

[gimymblert]

One of my problems is I have stupid high standards, so whenever I start drawing something I get annoyed because it isn't immediately perfect in every way.

Recognizing this made your problem half solved.

Beside that, art is logic, more than some want to hear. By simply blindly following the rules you can become quickly an efficient artist. You will not necessarily produce great art but it will functional and just good enough. Composition is key first. The real things that will bring you trouble should be realistic organic flow.

[jwk5]

One of my problems is I have stupid high standards, so whenever I start drawing something I get annoyed because it isn't immediately perfect in every way. I'd like to aim lower, but one of the things that put me off drawing was being forced to draw apples and still life continuously in school. I guess I don't understand the process of drawing well enough to see where it starts (and I have no interest in drawing fruit).

It'd be cool to see how someone else approached it.

The thing with drawing apples (for example) is that you're not just learning to draw an apple when you draw one, you're learning to draw things that shares its shape, texture, etc. I whipped this little example up in MS Paint (so forgive the crappiness) to give you an idea of what I mean.
Just be patient with yourself. 90% of the drawing I do is pretty much stick figures but it allows me to churn out ideas very rapidly and build the visions in my head that I need to create a solid work. If you don't let yourself have fun with it then you are going to have a hard time getting very far with it (nobody wants to do something that makes them miserable).

[Alistair Aitcheson]

Artwork for use in games is a slightly different beast to artwork for paintings, comics or anything else. It's less about detail and expression, more about clarity and functionality. That's my general perspective anyway.

I know a lot of people who are fantastic artists but can't draw a decent or usable run animation for a game. Similarly, I don't think I'm much cop at detailed scenes, realistic faces and whatnot (I'm always learning though), but I'm very happy with my abilities to do animations for game characters and objects.

Don't worry too much about practicing artistic techniques just yet - just dive in, make some game sprites, and use them in-game. Don't worry about anatomy, lighting or anything like that, just worry about whether the main guy looks like a guy or not, and then if it looks like he's running. The more you do the better you'll get at this. You'll develop your own best practices and techniques for getting solid usable animations.

Once you get the hang of using your artwork in a game then you'll know what skills you need to build to make decent game artwork, and you'll end up learning the rest naturally.

[ink.inc]

In the span of one month, I went from this:

pretty cool

to this:

awesome

I only started to do pixel work a year ago, and I only started to draw a year before that.

That's pretty interesting dude, do you have anything from when you were just starting out drawing?

I don't, unfortunately. I started out with pencil and paper, and I'm terrible at keeping things.

A piece of advice I would give to the OP is to just ape the shit out of artists that you like. Maybe this is a controversial statement, but it's a really quick way to learn.

But when I say 'ape', I don't mean the outright tracing/plagiarism you find so readily on sites like Deviantart. To clarify, you should see what kind of techniques a given artist uses and take from them what you will.

Take, for example, Kinnas (an artist who hangs out in the Art thread here at TIGS). I loved how energetic and textured his paintings were, but had no idea how to really achieve that effect. So when he posted what brushes he used to do things like this:




you'd better believe that I was the first one downloading it and trying to mimic his techniques.

[jwk5]

This was something I created back in 2006 or thereabouts to see how I'd progressed over a decade. I've come a long ways...