The "Artistic" evolution of a Non-Artist

This sort of ties in with my previous blog post.  Today I'm going to focus on art again.  To reiterate, I think for the majority of projects, art has reached the minimum standard necessary to invite people to download and play the game (or at the very least, search and watch a Let's Play of it).  This is pretty much across the board and in this respect I hope I've been able to keep up.

Left:  Character from my first ever VN which sputtered and died after Chapter 1.
Right:  Concept Pose for a Yuri VN, everyone's busy so it's in the backburner for now.

So what happened?

* I have meticulously studied and reverse-engineered Deji's PSDs.
* I have worked in an outsource animation studio and was fortunate enough to be able to walk around and look over people's shoulders.
* I abandoned the default texture filters in Photoshop and now handpaint my own textures.  (I still use lens flares though!)
* I have learned to use SketchUp now for all BG preproduction, at least the perspectives must be right (handpainting the 3Dness to come later)
* I use pose references.  Every. Single. Time.  I used to get poses by rotoscoping porn (hey, artistic nudes!) then realized that while porn models are supermodels, anime characters are hypermodels and you still have to thin the waist, arms and legs by at least 80% compared to real human proportions.  Now I just get poses from basic dollshapes and lots of adjustments afterwards are a requirement.
* I have commissioned some artists along the years and studied the drawings as they came in.

So what's the big deal?  Unlike other people who started drawing at an early age and churn out professional art in college, I only started to learn how to draw in college itself (in between my part time job).  In essence, I consider myself a non-artist.  Applying to art school at the time would be laughable -- instead I took up microprocessor system design and other (now-useless) courses.

So all this, just so that I can make games (specifically, eroge).  I still suck though, especially when it comes to shading and lighting, and there's no easy way to go about it, since lighting conditions always change depending on perspective and time of day.  And I'm totally not good at UI, which is what software is 90% about (user experience).

And what is the biggest lesson I learned all these years?  I actually can't write very well!  Yeah, so all this ramp up to no avail.  I didn't really get to practice much creative writing.  Here's my noteworthy masterpieces:

1.) A short story I wrote when I was 11 years old;  a perfect clone of the first Ferrengi encounter in Star Trek:  TNG
2.) A 500-page thesis paper on the differential equations governing the conversation of kinetic energy of ocean waves into electrical energy for tidal power generators.  It sucked in hindsight since my research was half-assed.  Fortunately my professor at the time seemed content to look the other way and do something else. (since America imports professors from China and India even though their English is barely comprehensible).
3.) A 700-page business recovery manual describing in intimate detail how to set up a backup operation site in case of emergency.  Barely two years afterwards, the company downsized to 1/10th its previous size.  Most of those 700 pages, by the way, were contact details of the eventual non-employees who wouldn't want to be contacted anyway.

So I should have spent more attention to my writing.  Then again, I only wanted ever to make RPGs and Fap-sims, both involve heavy grinding as the main gameplay element, so story really isn't necessary.