80 posts tagged with "art"

Looking back at my final art blog post in 2024 I want to laugh. Not at what I was wrapping up, but where I laid out the goals for my art practice of 2025.

I acknowledged that we were going to start 2025 with a game jam and that would be my art for January. But little did I know that that game jam would completely change the direction the year would take.

January​

January was full focus on Love in the Time of Spellphage. There were characters, there were backgrounds, there were random other assets needed to just add a little more flare. I covered most of these in my DevLog posts last year.

We've been hard at work on the Fateweaver prototype as a funding opportunity looms ahead of us in August.

Sophie's been implementing the ruleset we came up with months ago while adding animation and design in Godot. I've been creating the main art assets that we'll need to make the game playable but also have some of it's final style. I'm happy I spent so much time trying out different styles because it gave me time to really get better at the one we went with, woodcuts.

With a few social plans cancelled for the weekend, I was able to get my last remaining cards done this weekend and declare version one of the Fate Cards ready to go.

While a lot of my time has been on studio stuff and Fateweaver assets these last few months, I’m still squeezing in some additional learnings. Not all of them art related. So this is a grab bag of random things kind of blog post.

From marketing our existing games to more early concept work for our new game.

Since our existing games were done for game jams they didn’t really have much of a development cycle, you kind of jump straight into production for game jams. I remember very clearly sitting down on January 1st and getting started on character sprites for Spellphage with very little preparation. I had made Pinterest boards for a few of them, maybe did a few messy sketchy Lauren attempts, but that was it.

For Fate Weaver we’re giving ourselves way more than a month. We still want to keep development tight but we are still aiming to have a playable demo out before the end of the year. This feels like a luxurious amount of time at the moment but I know it’s going to feel like nothing soon.

This does mean that I still need to be smart about the art style we go with. For an MVP of a demo we’ll still need 20 Fate Cards, 5 Land cards, 10 items, and hopefully 2 characters. It’s still a decently large amount of assets so I want to choose a style that’s not too difficult to pull off consistently.

So I’ve been experimenting.

After valiantly trying to keep posting through my sickness in March and April, I finally lost the energy to keep up. All my energy was going into getting through the days and staying present at work. Hobbies are always the first thing to suffer when the going gets tough.

And as a person who works best with momentum and consistency, losing my stride is one of the worst things that can happen to my practice.

I’m now in the stages of trying to get re-interested in drawing. Doing focused practice isn’t “fun” but I did it regularly because I do find myself improving because of it. But that doesn’t make it desirable. So instead of trying to get back into WAPs and anatomy studies and doing the classic “draw what you want” approach.

Currently that means having a bunch of half-finished pieces hanging around with no idea if I’m ever going to finish them or not. But they have gotten me drawing again.

We launched our studio website the other week and while I’m happy with it I do feel like it’s lacking in art. I’d love to do little cartoon versions of myself and my wife but cartoon versions of real people is something I’ve never been great at. This week's study of guitar playing poses is me starting the baseline work for that as I know I’m going to do a few attempts of my wife playing guitar.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

While I at least understand how guitars are held and played, keeping a large object in proportion to a body is still difficult for me.

This 3 image reference study stretched into 2 weeks as I got distracted by other art projects and also had my energy drained due to on-going health problems.

And then Blue Prince was released and I forgot that blogging was a thing I did.

But a long weekend has given me the downtime I need to return to my hobbies and project and also Blue Prince.

Reference Images​

The big masked creature is by Bryn Jones @artwithbryn. Trying to find the source really highlighted for me how awful it is when artists only have an Instagram page. I don’t want Facebook/Meta touching my computer so I’m not going to log into Instagram on my computer, which means I can only see the last 9 posts from a user >_>

The squirrel is Acorn collector by mousse on DeviantArt.

And the boat on the waves, my piece used as colour scheme inspiration, is by Dmitrij on Dribble.

This week started off as a reference study. I had my 3 references selected, got through some thumbnails, did some different colour compositions and even started painting.

But then there was a joke; What if Pink Pony Club, but it’s Pawmi instead of Pony. As context, a Pawmi is a recent gen Pokemon. This is a Pawmi:

The next day I went to see what colour shiny Pawmis are, and well, they’re pink. The joke basically writes itself. So I paused my reference study and drew Pawmis for a few days.

Time for a casual WAP week with axolotls. Partially inspired by the axolotl I drew during Root week, I thought it might be a good time to really look at them and see what features I might have missed in my quick cartoonification.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

I really couldn’t remember what their feet looked like.

Second style study of the year is the art of Hades, the hit Supergiant game and one of my all time faves.

My approach to this week was to re-create some existing game assets and then adapt one of my characters into a Hades styled portrait shot. A slightly different approach from my Root week as I found this style much more difficult and just mentally draining because of how central the line art is to the style.

Main focuses for the week:

• Line art style
• Colours
• Ink black shadows