Learning to Draw #2

Hello!

This is the second post on the series where I, as a programmer, share my experience of trying to learn the basics of drawing. On the first post I made a 2d wooden crate, and was pretty happy with the result!

This week I have 2 drawings, for the first one I’m continuing the theme of “Common objects you find in most video games”, it’s red and it explodes when you shoot it. Yep, an explosive barrel!

This one was kinda tricky because even though it’s a 2d drawing the object is round, so to give that effect I made it round on the top end on the bottom and then tried to apply some shadows.

To make the shadow effect I just used a brush that has transparency (with the same color of the background color), and used more brushstrokes on the parts that were supposed to be darker. Later on I used a watercolor brush to give the barrel some stains, and also some gray and brown details to make it look old and rusty. It’s far from perfect but I think it turned out ok =)

Now for the second drawing I tried something different and more challenging.

I wanted to try something else using shadows, so I decided to draw a red curtain, one of those fancy heavy ones you either find in a century old mansion or on a David Lynch movie.

Unfinished

 

Now the shadows here are pretty tricky and took me a lot of trial and error to make it even resemble a curtain. Turns out fabric is really hard to represent.

The transparent brush I used in the barrel did not work well here so I tried something different, initially I used a darker tone of red to draw the hard shadows, but it soon became apparent that I would need more than that, I needed more than one intensity of shadow.

This is the finished curtain, I tried alternating between thick and thin lines for the shadows, and later on I added some watercolor effects on the edges and other places that should be darker.  I wasn’t very happy with this one, maybe I should try it again when I have more experience.

That’s it for this post, hope you guys liked it, I got a ton of great feedback last time, specially from some professional artist and from some other programmers that also learned how to draw. It will take some time for their feedback to start showing on my drawings since I had a few os these queued up.

I will try to take more screenshots while I draw since I think it might be interesting to see how the drawing itself progresses before it is finished.

As always, if you have any suggestions let me know, really appreciate all the feedback!

Next time I’ll do a Sword and a Shield =D

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Tools used:

iPad Mini (1st gen)

Paper (universal app on iOS)

Cheers,

Robson A. Siebel

How we created our logo!

Hello!

We decided to make a small post talking about how we created the logo (and  the name) for our company.

Alberto, our artist, was the one that came up with the idea of the “Chimera”, after we had a discussion about what was our vision for the company. Our goal was to make little experiments, games that are different from what you usually see. And not  only that, but we wanted every game to be very unique on it’s own, not a copy or sequel from the previous game. And that’s why we chose the “Chimera”, a fusion of different beasts that gives birth to a powerful magical creature.

So that takes care of the Chimera part, but why “Mini”? Well,  first of all, we had to be humble, we are just a two person team, so using the image of a big monster seemed a little off, like we are trying to compensate or something. And besides that, our focus is also on mobile, all our games fit on a small  device that you carry around in your pocket, so that seemed appropriate.

Of course the logo will change and improve over time, it is not (and should not) something set in stone. We even did an alternate creepy version for our second game.

Learning to Draw #1

I don’t know how to draw, I always wanted to, but I was never very good at it. Granted I never really tried that hard either so I should’t complain.

No I’m a programmer and game designer so that doesn’t really matter, I have a very talented friend (Alberto) who works with me and does all the art for our games.

But every now and then I get the urge to try somehting myself, if you work with games you probably know what I’m talking about, specially if you’re one of those guys that make everything in your game (developer of Stardew Valley comes to mind).

So a while ago I found this app called Paper, on iOS, and I decided to try it out. The app is really well designed and easy to use, every line I drew seemed like it could become something beautiful.

In order to have goal in mind and to practice I decided to draw a series of images themed around games, so what would be the most common object to appear on video games? The first thing that came to my mind was a wooden crate, it was also easy to draw. And maybe I would do a series of blog posts about it, it took a while but here it is =)

I decided to stick to 2d for the time being, because hey, I told you I don’t know how to draw, bringing perspective in is a whole other beast.

What I really like about the lines in Paper is that they are not even and perfect, they really give you the impression that they were handmade.

In order to give the details to the crate I tried to use a somewhat scrawled trace.

This is what it looked like after I finished.

I tried using some watercolor effects to make it look more like wood but that did not work exactly how I expected. That said I was very satisfied with the results and decided to keep the experiment going.

If you have any tips on how I can improve my poor drawing skills, please let me know! Also if you have any suggestion on what I should draw or even questions regarding the process, get in touch on the comments or via email: robsonsiebel at gmail.com 🙂

I’ll post another one next week!

Tools used:

iPad Mini (1st gen)

Paper (universal app on iOS)

Cheers,

Robson A. Siebel