Traditional Art: An Awesome Craft

Hello All,

So when thinking about going into a field like Game Art and Animation you really only think of digital things. You'll think that you'll mainly be working and learning digital art software to create the models, textures, animations, and captures. You usually don't think that any kind of traditional art would be necessary. You'd be surprised though to find out that, yes, traditional art styles and skills are needed for this field.

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When I was in high school I had a great art teacher. She taught me many of the basic and advanced skills of traditional art. Some of the techniques I still use to this day are the ones that she taught me. Unfortunately she wasn't the most supportive of digital art and didn't consider it an actual art form or something successful one could do as a career. Due to this I was discouraged from doing any digital art throughout high school. This isn't something I look back at and regret, it's actually something I am happy about. I personally think that an artist should have a round understanding about the fundamentals and basics of art before working in digital. My teacher was right in one aspect about digital art. It doesn't follow the exact same rules as traditional and often distorts and helps the artist too much. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just saying that you skip some skills when doing digital art with no traditional background.

When coming to UAT I had no experience of digital art. I wasn't worried because I started off in basic classes. One of my favorite classes here at UAT was my Sculpting class. I had never done sculpting before and I had a lot to learn from this class. I didn't realise it, but by the end of this class I had such a round understanding of what the human body I am now confident to draw it whenever necessary. I also took a class called The Anatomy for and Artist. This taught me even further about how each muscle is influenced by another.

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I talk about all of this because traditional art, whether it be drawing or sculpting is something that is needed in the industry. 3D modeling characters takes a great amount of sculpting skill, just as back grounds and environments in 2D games requires a great amount of painting skill.