I have a question about game art: How is the usual way of creating art for a 2D game? After you have some sketchs, how do you create the final work? Do you first draw it on paper, then scan it, color/edit or do you directly draw it in the computer? Here are some examples of 2D art I'm speaking about: Pic 1 Pic 2 Pic 3 Pic 4 I'm creating a small game and I draw my objects directly with Photoshop (with a simple graphics tablet). It's very practical but sometimes I don't manage to draw it like I would on paper and it has a typical style. Just want to get some ideas of how you do it. Thank you!

">YouTube - making art for World of Goo
I'm not an artists but I hope the video helps.

Thanks for the reply!
This is a cool video, I had seen it before. I love World of Goo =)
Now I see that that they scan a sketch and use it as a reference in Photoshop.

Is this the most common way to do it?

Everyone has their own method, I think. Above all, do what works for you.

I used to draw on paper exclusively but I found the whole process of scanning a picture in, adjusting, then having the re-scan the picture to do any adjustments to the original linework to be a huge pain, so I set myself to learning to do everything digitally. And now I do -- Photoshop is my world and with a wacom tablet I do everything from sketching to finished work. If I draw on paper it's because I want to sketch while screwing around in a coffee shop or something.

It just takes practice. Digital drawing/painting is more natural than paper to me now.

I find it easier to work out proportions and poses on paper, then I clean up the linework and add color in the computer. It would be faster if I could sketch right into the computer, but when I tried one of those tablets I just couldn't get used to it.

But you've got some completely different stuff in your examples there - the undersea one is digital painting probably done in photoshop or gimp, but the penguins one is probably vector art done is illustrator or inkscape. (I mostly do vector art myself.)

All the illustrators I've worked with have always used a graphics tablet. Even some of the 3dsMax/Maya/ZBrush guys use it via a tablet.

Thank you guys for your replies!

You are right, everybody has its own methods, and that's good so :)
I'm also getting used to draw on the tablet.

Can you answer one more question?
How to you create 2D animation? This is where I really have no experience.
Do you draw each frame on its own? Do you use a transparent layer for the frame before? Is there any tool available that helps creating animation?

Thank you again!

If you draw on paper, you draw each frame by hand and you use a lightbox.
If you are using bitmap/raster art you still need to make each frame by hand except you can copy and paste parts which aren't moving between two frames. Gimp has an animation preview utility, there are probably other pieces of software that also do. Photoshop unfortunately does not.
If you are using vector art the process of animation is quite different, much more like 3D animation. Inkscape does not currently do animation. I believe Illustrator does limited amounts of Illustration. Flash is probably the obvious choice for vector animation, in that case you're probably making the whole game in Flash.

Thats not true, photoshop does infact have animation support in it, and you can run the animation frames from within it. You can even export them directly to other photoshop programs like image ready and make swf files quickly for short animation sequences ;)

I'm not sure if this is in every version, but I have cs3 extended and cs4 extended and the animation tools are in both. Photshop can make doing sprite animations very handy because your layers become frames and you get a direct overlay, it will even make cleans for you :D

I have already tried creating animations with Photoshop, but my start image had maybe 5 layers and then I started creating new frames, moving/rotating layers and at the end the image had maybe 80 layers, and this is painful to manage...

Thank you for the replies.
Have a nice weekend!
Aeroz