Hi! I’ve been looking to discover new artists a lot lately, which inspired this thread! I think every artist has at least a few pieces that are their favourite. I’ll go with some of mine!
No AI is used in my process, progress pics are here!
Also, are there any pieces of art that you initially weren’t a big fan of when you finished them, but later warmed up to them?
I don’t know if I’m the kind of “artist” you’re interested in, but I’ve been making a bunch of silly drawings and posting them lately. Some people seem to enjoy them. I’ve also written a fair amount of music but I generally don’t share that. I used to want to be a game developer and ended up getting good at programming, so-so at music, and basically hated everything I tried to make as far as graphics went.
Recently though, I’ve found it incredibly liberating to allow myself to make “bad” art – to not be too concerned with the quality and just concentrate on having fun trying to express an idea however I can.
This has mostly taken the form of “MS Paint”-like drawings that I’ve posted to !sillydrawingrequests@sopuli.xyz (and occasionally other communities). Usually I make them with KolourPaint. Sometimes I also use the GIMP or my own custom software.
I think my own overall personal favorite, so far, is “Sock Trek”. I posted it back in 2023 from kbin (RIP) to Otter’s sockpuppetsociety community, I think:
Probably the best of my recent silly drawings in terms of technique is this one in response to “An expressive window suffering from / enjoying the weather”:
The most popular (based on upvotes) seems to be my response to “E.T. (the alien) eating an unreasonable quantity of free samples at costco”:
I’ve occasionally made some other things that might be interesting to look at, like this hypnotic color spiral animation (first 90 seconds) from a program I wrote to experiment with graphics techniques a few years ago – https://files.catbox.moe/8y6d0n.mp4 – and a number of custom composites from anime screenshots.
Haha I love the sock characters! At first I thought they were worms on a string. They’re cute! You mention wanting to get into game development, which is cool! Got a particular genre or engine that you want to go for?
I used to use Game Maker waaaay back in the day – starting from when Mark Overmars had it hosted on his university website (before the .nl site even) and checked out of that community sometime after YoYo Games took over – which was… 18 years ago!?
I wrote a substantial amount of C++ code with GLFW and occasionally other libraries for many hobby projects over the years. I lost a lot of enthusiasm when Unity became popular, and at some point after that I realized that games are mostly art projects, and I was more interested in the tech side of it.
These days I mostly write Python and JavaScript with the occasional bit of C++ (or whatever is needed) for work. Sometimes that work gets visual, but a lot of it is webdev.
If I ever get back into gamedev, it’ll be indie dev to scratch a personal itch – most likely with my own code rather than an off-the-shelf engine.
I’m glad you enjoyed my characters. :-)