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Art styles that are good for people who suck at art?

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Hi, I’m a programmer. As per tradition that means I’m a shitty artist. Shitty artists have always found ways to appear less shitty. Some classics are “purposely badly drawn doodles make games fun” and “using only cubes I can focus more on the gameplay with less distraction”. That worked well a couple years ago, but people are starting to catch up. The time has come where I need to truly practice an art style until I can make visually pleasing games without smoke and mirrors. So my question is, what art style would be good for a beginner (100% noob) to learn? Is there anything not too hard that still looks nice? Also, where do I begin?

Thanks for any and all help.

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I think there’s some fundamental styles for art as a whole, but everyone has their own style. I think everyone is capable of art but some people are geared more towards the functioning of things, I happen to be one of the few who has a fairly fundamental understanding of programming and a willingness to further my knowledge in the subject, but I am definitely more knowledgeable when it comes to art; I can still do programming and learn it, it just takes me a bit longer, same probably goes for you, but art may not be your strong point like it is for me.

How I learned to make decent art is just doing online tutorials for Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, I stuck with Photoshop, the raster side of things, and didn’t really do too much vector art, don’t get me wrong, I like vector art, but it’s just not my personal style. However for you, I think you may enjoy a vector style of art, it can be simplistic and look cool/retro, or you can give it some half decent detail, it gives you an excuse to have basic art because that is the style of the game. Games for example like shift, or most of the games you see on Steam by indie developers are done by doing vector techniques. If you don’t understand what I mean by vector and raster, here’s a good idea:

Vector doesn’t tend to show individual pixels as easily as raster does, the fundamental ways the softwares handle the pixels and color ranges give your art a completely different look. With raster I can easily smash all these pixels together to make beautiful colors and add effects and do all these crazy things, while with vector it’s very smooth, and clean, and not so chaotic, but you can get some amazingly cool looks out of it, it just depends on your personal preference.

Definition of vector art:
“Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s), which are all based on mathematical expressions, to represent images in computer graphics. “Vector”, in this context, implies more than a straight line toward align."

Basically covers what I was saying above, it has a different way of handling things, it’s more smooth and focused on that standpoint.

Definition of raster art:
“In computer graphics, a raster graphics image, or bitmap, is a dot matrix data structure representing a generally rectangular grid of pixels, or points of color, viewable via a monitor, paper, or other display medium. Raster images are stored in image files with varying formats.”

Again, a different way of handling individual pixels, it’s on a grid as opposed to the systematic way Illustrator handles it, which is through curves and shapes.

In a nutshell, it just effects the look of your work depending on which style you choose, because really that is the fundamental stylings, there’s vector, and raster, raster would be pixel art, photo manipulation, even photography. Vector, I honestly don’t even know what mediums that covers, vector is just, well, vector! Regardless, they can both do some AWESOME stuff, so either way you go you’re making the right choice :) but judging by your personality, I would recommend vector for you, I think you’d enjoy it.

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Thanks for your knowledgeable and helpful answer. I took your advice and started searching around and found EXACTLY what I was looking for.

^Even the URL makes me happy

I started on his first tutorial (they seem to get harder as they go) and am working my way up. I’ve only made a few drawings but I’m starting to feel a lot more confident.

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More power to you, and you’re very welcome.