Soon... so soon

The next couple weeks are going to be hectic so I will not be posting as much nonsense. In fact when I get done with school I plan on doing some tutorials. Things I have seen come up in the cocos2d-iphone forum. I have been posting something Monday through Friday for the last three weeks and I am proud that I could keep up with it.

School is just getting the best of me. Finals are coming up and I have to make sure I end well so I can graduate with the highest GPA I can. This is a personal goal for me. 

Improvements

My art has been improving much since I have been practicing more. Some of the things I have learned about drawing in general is to use confident strokes when drawing. What exactly does that mean? Don’t draw slow. You need to understand the line and the movement of the line and just draw it. You don’t have to press down hard when you draw just make a nice smooth draw line.

The other thing I am doing now that I was not doing before is putting in shading. This involves picking a light source and shading the object appropriately. Drawing things from real life really helps with shading so you can get as many examples as possible to draw. Shading will then improve.

Another thing I did was get some different weight pencils that help with making light and dark lines. New pens and pencils always open up my drawings. The way I draw with a pen is very different form a pencil. Sometimes just using different types of pencils can really open up and inspire new drawings. 

The Perfect Monster

The Aliens from the movie Aliens have to be by far the best movie aliens ever. They are flawless. They have a biology that is so cold and impersonal that itself makes them very scary. There have been some Aliens and Predator movies that ruined it a bit for me. Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem killed it a little bit. When they gave the Predator alien the ability to impregnate people I thought that was kind of lame. There is a new game out now but my PC is not powerful enough to run it so I am going to have to wait.

I found some very good anatomy books online that I have been using to practice my figure drawing. Figure drawing is one of the best ways to improve yourself overall because there are so many things you can learn from drawing the figure. Understanding how the bones fit together and then how the muscles attach to the bones and then how they flex or relax depending on what position they are in creates a lot of variable things to draw.

George Bridgman and Andrew Loomis are two authors I really like. You can search for their books on pdf online. I highly recommend them. The other figure drawing book that I really like is Burne Hogarth. 

Nineteen Days Left

And I am done with school. I can’t wait. It’s been a long five years. 

On to other things, I started a sketchbook over at ConceptArt.org. I hope to continue adding my sketches and getting feedback on what I can do to improve. So far some of the art I have seen has been fantastic and you can actually see the improvement people are making. It’s fantastic.

Yesterday I had a serious talk with my kids. I asked them what they thought about clearing the town in Animal Crossing for the Wii. They were ok and so we have a new town with new people. Unfortunately we didn’t get a new fruit.

From Idea to Launch

A year ago I was working on Star Catch for the iPhone. I got started by going out and buying my laptop. When I got it and got home the first thing I did was set my laptop up and begin getting everything I needed to start working on games.

To learn the SDK I read the book Beginning iPhone Development by Jeff LaMarche and Dave Mark. I took a week to go through that book and learn the basics of making apps.

I had already had ideas lined up that I wanted to work on. I ran them by my family. There were three that really stood out. One was a game my wife really liked and the other was Star Catch. I decided to try Star Catch because I thought I could get it out quicker than the other idea.

Star Catch did not require any fancy animations.

My first challenge was to figure out how I was going to write the game. I didn’t know if I had to use OpenGL or if I could use Quartz 2D. My initial tests showed that Quartz might be too slow. So I started reading OpenGL ES tutorials and I was on my way.

I struggled for a week trying to get the lasso part working in OpenGL ES. I tried different things but could not get a good prototype working.

Then I found cocos2d-iphone library. Cocos2d encapsulated a lot of OpenGL that I wouldn’t have to worry about. I believe using libraries like this is a huge time saver and you get the support from the community. Which means you can focus on making games and not creating the billionth game engine. I know there are some people too stupid to realize this and waste a lot of time telling everyone that they should write code using OpenGL and not use cocos2d or unity when they themselves can write code. Instead they get other people smarter than them to write it for them. (I have never used unity for any projects and probably won’t because of the cost).

Once I got acquainted with cocos2d I was up and running at the end of two and a half weeks. From there I coded non-stop any chance I had for another month and a half.

I will continue with this more later

Perspective

There are a lot of different people in this world working on different things. What people spend their time on improving will be different from what you spend time on. If anything the important thing, at least for me, is that you spend some sort of time improving something. You might be thinking, “What the heck are you talking about?”

I spent some time last night at ConceptArt.org and saw some absolutely awesome art work in sketchbook section. These were kids 16 to 18 years old doing awesome stuff. Looking at all of this I think about where I am and where I want to be and feel the pull. I think this is a mistake though.

I spend my time learning new things the way I do it. A principle I stand by but don’t practice well enough is accepting things for what they are now. You cannot change anything until you realize where you currently are and the current state of things. The fact is I love learning and these young artists should instill a sense of wonder and awe at the cool things I will learn.

Am I reacting to the age difference though? I should not. I remember when I was that old I didn’t have a quarter of the discipline these guys did to study the way they are. But that doesn’t matter. Now is now. One thing I have noticed about becoming older is the perception of time is warped. Even more warped than when I was young. 

Awesome books

I found some great books tonight on drawing and digital painting. I have already learned some important things.

One thing is I am way to impatient when it comes to drawing. I want to draw things fast and get them done. I need to slow down and really think more about what I want to draw rather than doodle all of the time. If I actually spent some good time on a drawing and tried to make it better I would be coming out with some cool stuff.

Spending time working on my drawings and making them look better will make me a better artist and when I do draw things faster I will be able to draw them better. So obvious right?

Here are the books I bought (Affiliate link)

       

Right now I am planning on relaxing with a focus on drawing when I finish my classes. I have to keep drawing right now so I can keep improving.