Starting from the very beginning so far down the road you can’t see where you’re coming from
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So last week was the first week of art-class for me and my fellow game design students. Ours is an eclectic and diverse bunch of people with very varying degrees of skill when it comes to drawing. Now I feel that I’m a pretty resourceful person with a lot to offer the games industry. I have many marketable capabilities that would be applicable on a development team. Apart from being a game designer (In a few years time I’ll have a phd to prove it), I’ve been a musician all my adult life. I’m a skilled composer, a decent FX designer and a very good music producer. Furthermore, having run my own business as well as worked in such disparate fields as market analysis and project management I feel that I will be able to contribute to a game developer’s itinerary in other useful ways. After all developing a game means that someone has to do the boring stuff like management, finances, marketing, statistics, target demographics research etcetera. These are the skills that I imagine bringing to the table professionally in terms of game production. But now I’m studying drawing, designing graphics and characters, making the visual content of a game. It’s not just a challenge, it’s an overwhelmingly intimidating undertaking. I haven’t held a sketching pen since art classes in high school some 15 years ago and I can’t begin to explain how immensely out of my depth I feel. But of course I know that I’ll have use of these skills, even if I’ll never be Rembrandt. It helps communication greatly if the designer is aware of the basic conditions of the different parts that make out the whole of the game design process. Perhaps the main thing is that I REALLY hate sucking at things. I’ve made it a principle to never try and put my nose into fields where I haven’t got any business voicing an opinion. There are so many fantastic talents at the University, people whom I imagine employing in a heartbeat when business starts taking off. Competing against them and their massive head start just seems like an exercise in futility. That sounds like a challenge of an entirely different kind, however. One that a person of my exacting disposition might be inclined to take on. So against my own better judgment I’ve taken it upon myself to try and get good at drawing in my advanced age. I have art and graphics studies on my schedule all this winter and all next year. I’ve also taken the liberty of signing up for extra art classes including summer class. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. First week assignment was to create a one page character design study. I sat up until early morning until I couldn’t feel my hand anymore to finish. I imagine me and my drawing hand will be bitter enemies for a while. Postat i:2D Computer Graphics: Theory and Application, 5SD013 Tagged: 2D Computer Graphics: Theory and Application, 5SD013  |
