Ramble - Everyone Can Do Art - Reflections on my Art Grind

There was this TikTok meme that broke containment a while ago. It rubbed me the wrong way, but honestly made a great point: 99% of the time when someone says they "can't cook" what they're actually saying is closer to "I don't have the time / resources / space to cook." Because as anyone who has seen Ratatouille could tell you, anyone can cook. I think the same goes with pretty much every artform. Writers, graphic designers and even (yes) the much coveted tabletop designer aren't innate roles and skillsets handed to you by a higher power. They're a practice that can be picked up with relative ease and mastered in time. They're a set of tools and tips and personal flairs built up over years that make up an artistic fingerprint unique to the artist.

Nowhere is this more evident than drawing.

Now I want to clarify really quick here that "good" doesn't mean "profitable." Anyone who thinks those two concepts are at all interdependent is either blissfully ignorant or willfully delusional. But "getting good" is something I do believe every hobbyist has in them, and is something worthwhile to pursue. 

The Background

About a year ago I had to mute the words "AI Art" because it was generating the most mind numbing discourse (that I categorically refuse to get into right now). Something meaningful I did take away from the whole debacle though was that, yeah, much like many insufferable tech-bros, I was pretty jealous of people who could make awesome art. And frankly (as someone making a pretty modest living) commissioning someone else for art is 4 out of 5 times a pretty miserable experience, both financially and in navigating communication of what you actually need.[*2]

Steel Hearts (which released last June) was easily one of my most successful titles on the marketplace, and that's a half baked ashcan. Yet even after making $3000 I barely covered a third of the total funds spent on art commissions to bring this game to fruition.[*1] Now, I don't make games to make money, but were this to continue I was just going to be busting my ass on my day job, my writing, promo and design all to essentially create occasional work for other artists and maybe get a bit of that back. And while I'm all here to support other indie creators, if I'm going to commission artists it's going to be art of my OC, and it's not going to be at Commercial Commission prices. The artists I worked with were amazing and talented and generally great people and I am legitimately honored and over the moon about how good their work was, but also I have thoroughly been there and done that.

The Process

Unlike most AI tech-bros, however, I've actually played and beaten most of the Souls games and had taken away a beautiful life lesson: "Most things in life are possible with enough time and practice. Believe in yourself and put in the work, and you too can achieve marvelous things!" [This lesson is often shortened to "get gud" by the community].

After releasing Steel Hearts and (despite it being kinda unfinished) achieving a life-long goal of releasing a game to critical acclaim, I realized I actually had a lot of my life left to live. The illnesses that had plagued my younger years and threatened to cut my life short had been dormant for years now. It was looking like I had at minimum another 25-30 years ahead of me (baring catastrophe). So why not pick up a new skill?

And so for the past year and a half I've been drawing, practicing and am finally getting to a point where my work doesn't look terrible! (I still have a lot to improve on, but there's progress!) For those who are interested in my process, I collated my big steps here and have provided links to some of my favorite resources:

• [Step 1] was Draw a Box. I still can't do this to be clear. But prior to the whole AI debacle I'd been considering picking art back up[*3] and knew my fundamentals were... lacking. I couldn't even draw a straight line. So I started Drawabox, a 100% free lesson structure that teaches you the fundamentals of sketching and drawing... I truthfully didn't follow the lessons super closely, nor did I get to a point where I could draw a box well (maybe I'll go back one day), BUT it did help me improve my strokes and general habits! (And I can draw a circle sometimes!)
• Once I'd gone through enough printer paper of lines and circles and triangles it was time to apply this, so (as any good artist) I [Step 2] started drawing stuff from reference that interested me. I bookmarked any art I liked on Twitter X and began taking individual elements and trying to draw them again. I still don't know face proportions or how many heads a high a person is really supposed to be (and lord knows half the artists I follow would have different answers) but I was pretty happy with my initial results. Enough that I got myself a sketchbook and some super fancy mechanical pencils [*4]. When did I find the time to draw you ask? Well whenever it's quiet at work I'd whip out my sketchbook and do as much as I could. I think drawing while at work is actually helping build a kind of muscle memory because my attention is always split. Who knows how good I'd be if I really sat down with no distractions.
• At this point I was getting a bit frustrated that I had no idea how to shape a hand or a leg. I was also mostly studying anime-styled artwork and wanted to know more human anatomy (especially feet), thus Step 3 I procured some reference books. The ones I've used that I like the most are the Morpho series (especially their books on mammals and hands/feet). I'm trying to expand my collection these days, so I've recently picked up a Tokyo Street Fashion photography book and am hopefully going to dive into Hikaru Hayashi's Drawing the Female Figure soon (unfortunately the latter is super NSFW so I haven't been able to spend much time with it -- Also I really want to get Hayashi-san's earlier instructional works on mecha).
• Step 4 I've been sharing some of my work on Instagram, but I figure it's time that you, my lovely readers, get to see a bit of my struggle bus from my sketch book. Recently I've been drawing more with no reference (and similarly have been grinding the fundamentals of certain body parts so I can later put it all together!) and frankly I'm pretty happy with my progress as someone who doesn't get to spend a lot of time on the art grind and is simultaneously juggling a million different things:

 

The Moral

In about 5 years I think you're going to see AI art everywhere. The tools will get better, more accessible and it'll flood the market with cheap same-looking shlock. And personally? I think that's whatever. Because to me AI Art misses the point of art. Much like ShutterStock photography feels souless, or how digitally tweened animations simply don't hit as hard as the hand-drawn stuff from the 90s, I don't think most mass-market AI works will have much visual staying power. If anything I think it could make true, stylistically unique, texturally tactile art all the more valuable and rare as fewer and fewer people take it on as a lucrative full-time job, and only the diehards pursue it out of pure love of the artform. Much like how Undertale has had more staying power than Assassin's Creed: Unity. 

To be clear I'm not pursuing art because I think it'll be profitable or lucrative or even make me any kind of famous (much like how I actively switched to making tabletop games despite them being unprofitable and non-lucrative). I'm doing it because when you make real handmade art, you get to give a little part of yourself with it. Instead of trying to grab someone's eyes while you pinch their wallet, you get to hand someone your beating heart in a way that transcends words and crosses the boundary of language.

And even more than that, it's truly fun and deeply fulfilling. If you like puzzles, shapes, thinking about your favorite things to look at, it's a blast. If beauty or horror or nature or waifus nurture your soul, there is no better way to get closer to that source than attempting to capture it on the page.

The moral is that anyone cook and anyone can draw, and frankly I think the people who try to do both will find their lives better for it.

[*1 : To be clear I didn't take out any loans or expect this game to be profitable, this was years of saving willingly thrown in a fire. That money was money spent to put the best foot forward possible for this product. I don't regret a penny of it... Well kind of. See a lot of that money and art didn't end up getting finished or even make its way into the book. And a good part of that is on me and poor planning. Lessons learned. I also ended up spending so much time doing art direction that it got to the point where I felt my time would've been better spent just learning how to draw instead of trying to get what was in my head out of another human being. People, after all, aren't machines you can just type prompts into and expect what you're looking for to come out. ]

[*2 : And this is without getting into how messy it gets hiring an artist if [like me] you categorically refuse to crunch people, because most freelance artists are (unfortunately) constantly crunching to get stuff out the door... and this is also without getting into how messy it gets if [like me] you pay everything in advance which means a not insignificant amount of that art you commission just never materializes if the artist you hired drops off the face of the internet... and this is also without getting into despite how much money I spent on art, I still feel like most of those artists should've made more money, but I simply didn't have the funds... it was a horrendous feel all around and one of the biggest reasons I took a long break from Steel Hearts and will seldom be working with artists on commercial products in the future. -- Also of note this is nothing against the amazing]

[*3 : So when I was a kid I tried getting into drawing quite a few times but really struggled because I didn't know to use reference or construction etc so I gave up and focused my skills into writing and pixel art instead (which actually wasn't the worst call!) - In 2019 I tried picking art back up again but quit because I lived with someone who was wildly talented (a gulf so wide that it was discouraging and I honest to goodness have never seen an artist who's better with pencil anywhere) but also had more traditional approaches. I shouldn't really say quit, because she's the reason I tried Draw a Box because I realized a lot of her skill was derived from mastery of fundamentals.]

[*4 : Oh lordy the way my art took a HUGE dip in quality when I switched to mechanical pencils. They are much better to use than Number 2s make no mistake, and I did catch back up after a few months. But whew if I have any recommendations for would-be artists it'd be this: Switch to mechanical pencils as soon as you can cause the skills transfer to pen and digital way better than pencil and you'll need the muscle memory.]