I kind of wanted to start this one off talking about motivation. Except I found I couldn’t figure out what to write. The reason was simple it was… I was feeling a bit down but largely it was because of the weather I realised. There is a lesson there about not being able to completely separate yourself from your environment, but it isn’t necessarily all that interesting to go into depth about. Also when you come down to it, at a certain point you have to realise if you go any further with the self-reflection you will end up staring into an existential abyss. So rather than do that I have been trying to channel it into something more positive.

Since I have been watching a lot of art videos I have been wanting to take my art seriously. I have been drawing since I was a kid, but for all of that time I have never wanted more than to sit down and draw whatever I felt like. I did buy some art books but I used them for reference rather than really learning that much from them. It is interesting how many drawing books me and my brother have bought and looked at their tips on how to draw and just not gotten it. The drawing books I have found use abstractions of shapes to construct people. Which in theory is good, it means you don’t need to know all the details to actually draw someone except… To me they have always been completely arbitrary. Information cannot be magically placed in your brain after all, there is always a step of decoding it. Which is to say you have to be able to integrate it into the knowledge you already have. You could remember something someone says accurately but if you don’t know how it relates to your own knowledge it may as well be a memory of a Doctor Seuss book for all it will help you (I mean of course in non-Doctor Seuss related matters). What did help right away was watching a short video of a Channel called “Love Life Drawing” where the youtuber talked about how drawing the ribs as an egg will help your figure drawing. Now as soon as he said that it was like “whoa!” An abstraction that is easy and actually makes sense? More than that since it has a link to the real world it means that suddenly I can actually measure it up against real people and test its validity. That’s right, a test for the validity of my art. Art is subjective and fuzzy but you can tell if someone has improved if you show an earlier drawing next to a later one. Part of art is about conveying information visually so that element can be tested and improved. Which means you can actually create agile experiments. You can say if I start using this abstraction does my art look better? I also realise that you can use quick sketches to iterate over drawing ideas to check the soundness before investing a lot of time into them. If we wanted to go further how about we talk about a continuous development pipeline for art. That is all about having an iterative process where you can always know if your art is in a “releasable state”. Now when it comes to programming there are a lot more techniques involved in catching defects and creating testing pipelines and so on but that I think is just because of the medium code is. If you draw for yourself you are the product owner, developer and automated testing suite. Other people are the end users. So if you develop a solid process for creating quality art and then post it on social media you kind of have a continuous development pipeline for art. There are of course differences for instance your production environment is also part of your tests and so on. Maybe the only real similarity is the fact both need iterative processes with fast feedback. If you care about what you are doing or at least want to save yourself a lot of effort, that is how you want to do anything. You will fail sometimes, so fail before you are too invested and fail in a way that lets you learn as much as possible.

What does that have to do with Illic you ask? I want to make it easier to design and add characters to my game. I also need to be able to recharge my batteries after spending a day in Unity. Then there is also just the joy of improving which leaks into everything in your life. Sometimes it might feel as though I have been trekking deep into a dark cave, thinking I was close to the bottom only to shine a torch down to see a yawning expanse far beyond my imagining but that isn’t a bad thing. If it was as easy as writing some prompts in a computer, who would care all that much about mastering it?

I haven’t been slacking work on Ilic either if you were wondering. There are still the caves of programming, the dungeons of game design and so on to plumb the depths of. I have been working on making input set-up in my game more flexible to make it easy to rebind controls and separate game and input logic. Something that is going to be essential moving forwards.

Anyway I have talked enough and I need to get ready to head out to work. I hope you all enjoy exploring the vast caves of creativity and don’t forget to take the flashlights of advice, good cheer and hope with you.

Until next time.