Trying New Things

Open question: How did YOU learn to do your specialty of art? Or even your casual mediums?


Today I was browsing IMVU (I deleted my old account and re-signed up yesterday to have a fresh browse) and found a few tutorials on making "stickers" and things like that. I couldn't find one on pixel art, unfortunately.

Pixel art is something I've wanted to get into for a while but I can't seem to start. It probably sounds silly to seasoned artists, but it's true! It happens to me in a lot of areas, Lolita and BJDs having been a few I've overcome.

It happens like this: I'm interested, I may see something that strikes my fancy, but I don't want to use it anywhere because it is not mine to use, so I'd like to make my own or something. I open Google and type in a broad term and it comes back with a million advanced results and I'm overwhelmed. With Lolita, it was the rules, the brands, the do's and do not's, the hair, the things I could get away with. There's a community to lurk there, so it wasn't so hard once I found it! With dolls it was similar, at some point it just clicked and I was able to find a lot of resources I just couldn't find before, for one reason or another.

It sounds silly to me, too. You would think that if I can search something and find it now, why couldn't I before? I do. But I just.. can't.

With pixel art, I found a simple tutorial and tried it out, but I found my drawings would come out strangely and 'rough', and I don't know what should go where. Is this just a skill artists pick up by observing their surroundings, a talent?

With digital art, well... I haven't really looked around as much, but I'm still unsure about how to clean up my old drawings. New layer then trace, right? I suppose a tablet would work better than my laptop touchpad! xD But really, some people's oekakis come out so superb, I wish I could watch them draw them.



So back to the question: How'd you go about it? What was the turning point for you, your initial interest, your first successful piece? All that jiz.