Hi! I'd like to study the techniques and creation of two dimensional art. Can you guys recommend any e-books (free or paid), printed materials, or online tutorials that would give me a firm background in techniques, terminology and so forth? Thank you in advance for your effort and time! If it helps, I really don't have any formal training in art and do mostly programming and math. This is a skill which I really don't have and I'd like to change that so that all of my projects can be more polished.

I think you'd be more likely to get useful information about visual arts in the Visual Arts forum! (^_^) Moving.

Thank you very much!

Um, give us a clue where you are starting from and where you want to go. Can you draw? Is there a particular style you want to produce, or a particular type of game art asset you want to learn how to make? Do you have any kind of deadline? Because if you want to do something complicated, like animating realistic humanoids in full color, and you're starting from not being able to draw, you're looking at years of study.

Thank you for taking time to respond! I apologize for posing my question in such a vague manner.

Aside from a few art classes in school (ordinary school, not college) I have no training whatsoever. I have never produced any significant quantities of art in my free time. Basically, I have next to no skill and no real experience.

My goal is to be able to produce the kind of art you'd find in modern 2D games (like New Super Mario Bros. or Braid). This is purely for my own personal development creatively, and has no set time constraints or applications to anything but hobby projects.

If this is still too vague, please point me towards resources which I must study in order to better understand my own goal. I have no knowledge of any technical terms or tools. I have only a genuine desire to expand my creativity. Art is something which I have largely ignored in favor of math and programming, and I'd like to correct my mistake and explore this very exciting field as part of my hobbyist work.

Again, thanks so much!

It is still a bit too vague, but better, and let me see if I can help clarify more.

You want to make "2D art in modern games". You need to define more specifically what kind of 2D art, because there are several. You could learn to make more than one kind but you need to pick one to study first, don't worry about expanding to multiple styles until much later. So, what kinds are there? Well, I think it's safe to assume you want to do digital art, not make game art by painting and scanning the paintings in or something odd like that.

The two types of digital art are bitmap (aka raster) and vector. Technologically, bitmap images are created at a specific resolution and the file format remembers the color of every pixel. On the other hand vector images are not created at a specific resolution, the file format stores them as a description of lines, curves, shapes built out of lines and curves, and the colors of these shapes. For bitmap images the free program of choice is Gimp. For vector images the free program of choice is Inkscape. So probably you want to get one of these two programs to start practicing in, and then you can follow along with some tutorials if you want, there are plenty of tutorials for both floating around. (Disclaimer: those are not the only two programs, just the two with the most users.)

The other choice you want to make is what style of art to study. The style are: Realism, anime, western comic, cartoon/chibi/SD, and there are several less common ones like art nouveau, gothic, cubism, impasto, pointilism, etc. Check out this diagram by Scott McCloud Basically, you want to collect examples of an art style you want to attempt to imitate, via google image search and/or looking in magazines and library books and scanning the ones you like. You can also look for style-specific references, especially for anatomy and coloring. Then you analyze your examples. You can try to reproduce a single example, or try to figure out what your elements have in common, the 'vocabulary' of the style you want to learn. Although the ultimate goal is to have unique individual style, and create original pieces not imitations, emulation exercises are very educational for beginners.

I think a good place to start would be around Artist Websites like those in my signature below. You can find all sorts of resources/tutorials and helpful information from the people there. You may also want to read Creating Good Game Art When Your Not An Artist.