Hello. I am a programmer. I am not an artist. But I want to try and learn some basic art techniques so I can at least draw decent looking sprites and such for my little games. What I want to know is, what techniques do all you great artists on this forum use? Do you just grab your mouse and Paint Shop Pro and start drawing, do you use scanned pencil sketches, or do you use combinations of many techniques or what?

You took the words out of my mouth #=o)

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That's just my 200 bucks' worth!

..-=gLaDiAtOr=-..

i would imagine i''d use a combination of both. but when i was doing animation, i used my trusty old tablet (which i still use). when you have a hold of a scanner, it makes it kind of easier, and more natural, then you can take those sprites and touch em up with color in psp or ps. for my animation, i used to 3d model a human, animate the inverse kinematics, and then "trace" over it with my tablet to give it a cartoon feel, so they might do that too (3d model, then trace over it). this way, the sprites would look uniform in any direction.

a2k

Thanks a2k, that was pretty helpful. BTW, my main problem area in art is drawing people. My grass and water tiles look pretty good, and buildings aren''t terribly hard for me to draw either. I have thought about using touched-up pictures of 3D models, but my main problem with that is a lack of a 3D modelling program. I can''t afford 3D Studio MAX, but I don''t think cheaper, shareware 3D modellers can do people models very well. Am I wrong here? Do programs like Rhino or Milk 3D do a good job at this?

Cant draw anything with my hands , but when I use freehand or illustrator in combination with photoshop or psp , I can whip up something good. 3d art , I use truespace .