How much of 2D art can be achieved by learning smoke & mirrors? (A Guide For The Talentless)
Lately, I've been struggling with learning game engines. Instead of delving into the Godot engine, I find myself reading about MonoGame, and rather than studying MonoGame, I'm observing graphic artists at work.
Watching most of them reminds me of this image about drawing an owl:
When I see an empty editor, everything seems manageable, much like when the first shapes appear. And then, it's as if the person's mind is cut off, and they wake up only to see the final artwork. Every time.
In today's world, someone wanting to do graphics has three options:
Free or paid assets, of which there's no shortage to the point where you can make an entire game from them.
AI, where advances are so significant that I'll want to make a separate edition just for them—so many tools!
Learn to create graphics or model shapes. Grasp the basics, learn from the smoke and mirrors of those willing to share, and forget about the need for talent (unless you have it 😉).
If there's a person to learn 2D graphics from, it's... Thomas Brush. Lately, he's been showing how to create landscapes, imposing various restrictions like "only circles," "only squares," or "only triangles.":
Of course, theory is not enough. Until I make ten such landscapes myself, I won't be able to say I've mastered the secrets of art (but that's not the point when you don't have talent and want/need to create graphics, right?).
But that won't stop me from making a cheat sheet right now! All the screenshots are taken from Thomas Brush's video.
Understanding colors and abstract shapes seems to be the key to success.
1. Prepare a palette of three colors
a muted light tone for the sky
a saturated shifted dark tone for the ground
a vibrant, complimentary (opposite) to the sky
The first two colors will create a gradient, providing many layers to our illustration. The third layer, the player layer, must stand out against the background. The player must quickly recognize it, and color will help with that.
2. Optionally, think about some constraints.
Not only will this force creativity, but it will also reduce the overwhelming choices. Choosing a simple shape (circle, square, or triangle) is an excellent example of such a constraint. We've already made one by choosing the color palette
3. Paint the sky
Use the first color to paint the sky (paint the entire picture).
4. Create successive layers
Create successive layers using colors from the gradient progressively approaching the second color.
Layers are your friends. Make as many as possible, and at the beginning, don't bother combining them at this point.
Create a very dark layer (black, perhaps?) that will slightly obscure the player layer.
5. Create background elements (trees, houses)
Treating them as repeatable elements, you can turn them into brushes (or something called a smart object in Photoshop) and create forests, mountain ranges, structures, etc.
6. Lighting
Imagine from which side the light is coming. Make shaded areas darker and illuminated areas brighter.
The overall picture must look good before moving on to details. If it doesn't look good, adding details won't help.
All these screenshots don’t do justice to the process. I encourage you to watch the three linked clips and search for similar things in Thomas’ archive.
The finished landscape won't, of course, be something you can immediately use in the game. But when you make enough that you like (don't be a perfectionist, remember, you don't have talent, so there's no point in going in that direction 😉), you can combine layers. Cut them into smaller elements that will become your assets. At some point, you have to cut your work of art 😜
I don't believe you can become a great artist with these tricks. But I think that would be a wrong perspective. You don't want to become a great digital art painter. But you want to be able to do graphics at an acceptable level, without unnecessary details. And if you're ashamed of it, it won't change the fact that it'll be perfect for the prototype, MVP, vertical slice. And if you have a publisher or crowdfunding - you can hire more talented people!
After watching multiple clips where Thomas is doing the Brush thing (bad pun, sorry) it kind of twists your way of thinking. But then again, when I see more of it, I start understanding the smoke & mirrors craft thing.
Take this for example:
This comes from an indie game Dead Unicorn. If you take some time and scroll through his WIP tweets you’ll see all this used all over. Starting with layering, repeatable elements like trees (not to be witnessed from the first look, at least for me). With a small twist of pixel art. And having the player layer a two-color style seems like an ingenious move, don’t you think?
Recommendations
Game Maker isn’t perhaps a game engine on my radar. I remember deciding not to do anything in it, because of the lack of 3D potential. That’s when I went into Godot. But I did play around with it for a bit. It has a NoCode solution, as far as I remember, its own programming language. And many games have already been made in it. Now it also has a free tier 😉
And here is an essay about tutorials. Worth watching!