To address some of the issues that I have been having when creating art assets for the game I sat down and really thought about why I was having so much trouble actually creating them.  While I was thinking I thought long and hard why I was struggling so much.  I knew that I had enough skill and ability to at least produce something reasonable, so why was it that I could not do a thing.

After thinking for a while and talking with my collogue I came to the realization that I have not produced anything out of laziness but more because of the type of artist that I am.  There are many different types of artists with many different skill sets.  They have many different strengths and weaknesses.  There are some that have very unique styles and can always easily create imagery in that style.  Others art “styleless” who cannot create anything completely from their minds, but must see examples of what they need to create.  I fall into the later category.

I was having such a hard time creating art assets because two key things were missing, an art style, and examples.  After being forced by my collogue to address these issues by picking something and sticking to it I came to the following choices.

The art style will be simple and vector based (at least initially) because this is where most of my skill lies, two it should be simple so that I do not fall into the habit of trying to create highly realized (overly realistic) imagery.

Earlier in the week google had done a nice “interactive” story telling about the Brothers Grimm, which had a nice simplistic graphic style, which was done by Matthew Cruickshank.  Something about its simplicity had caught my eye and I really enjoyed how he was able to tell so much with so little.  After talking with a few artists at work, various artists and some 50’s – 60’s children’s books were suggested.  Finally the art of Josh Agle, better know as Shag were also recommended.

Taking these into account but leaning more towards Cruickshank’s style laied the foundation of our art style.  Now with that out of the way, we came across my other problem.  Since I could only create what I saw and now that I had a lot of reference, none of them were rendered from above but only from the side.  Again this was one of the biggest challenges I have had, seeing something then trying to imagine it from above.  It really twists your brain.  I could have of course created or found 3D models, then orbited around them to get the angle and look that I wanted but even this would take too much time.  So Björn and I decided that we will now just worry about a side (or semi-side view).  This made things a lot easier cause I just had to copy what I saw instead of try to imagine it.  Also I was told to ignore animation (one of my other weaknesses) for now and if and when the time comes that I could not do it, then we would hire someone to handle the animation.

And so my work began…