umuu In reply to Sapphire899 [2012-06-30 20:22:43 +0000 UTC]

thank you!

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umuu In reply to lucas-irineu [2012-06-29 21:10:27 +0000 UTC]

Hi, stranger! Or do I know you?

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lucas-irineu In reply to umuu [2012-06-29 21:28:28 +0000 UTC]

I've seen you on PJ before, but I don't think we have ever been properly introduced, no.

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umuu In reply to lucas-irineu [2012-06-29 21:45:28 +0000 UTC]

Oh, I was wondering why you looked familiar, haha. Hi! Nice to see another PJ user on here

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lucas-irineu In reply to umuu [2012-06-29 21:58:47 +0000 UTC]

Haha. I like your stuff.
Personally, I think you should use a single account for pixel art and npa. And that you should do NPA more often. You're great at that, too. c:

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umuu In reply to lucas-irineu [2012-06-29 22:41:54 +0000 UTC]

I had a big response typed out to this only for dA to eat it when I accidentally hit the back button. Whoops.

Thank you very much for your kind words!! I did have it all on one account in the past, but it got discouraging when a pixel piece I spent maybe 30 minutes of slacking on would get far more attention than some NPA that I spent hours on and tried a lot of new things with. I noticed it was actually discouraging me from NPA - that's why I separated it in the first place. It was also uncomfortable knowing maybe 90% of my followers likely didn't care about my NPA and I was probably cluttering their messages with it.

Nowadays I care about favorites and comments and so forth a lot less as far as using them as a yardstick to measure my art's value with - I try to do art for my own benefit without worrying about other people. Not that it isn't extremely flattering to get people saying something kind about my work, but I've stopped fussing about how many people commented on this piece compared to that one or the number of pageviews I have or whatever. But it's still nice, for organizational purposes, to have two accounts! Maybe I'll merge them sometime, though. I really appreciate you saying such a thing.

I notice you do a lot of NPA yourself, like studies and traditional art. That's awesome! In my opinion, all pixel artists should practice in other mediums in their offtime, and of course do things like life drawing. I guess you can say that for any artform though, haha. Learning the principles of art really helps with any artform, and pixel art is no exception.

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lucas-irineu In reply to umuu [2012-06-29 22:54:51 +0000 UTC]

Yeah, the way I see it, pixel art is just a technique. You can paint with acrylics, oil, colored pencils, pastels, photoshop, stained glass, and even - pixels. But in all those cases, if you don't know how to draw, it's not going to work out. An amazing artist will still have to practice if he switches to a technique he is not familiar with, but even someone extremely familiar with a technique will still have to learn the basics that apply to all of them.

And yeah, favorites and comments, they are a nice way of seeing how much attention you're getting, but not much other than that. I'd rather have one awesome artist leaving a critique on my work than two dozens of so-so people saying "I like this!" or adding it to their favorites.

I don't do much pixel art these days (at all, really), because it's a really hard technique and I felt that I could spend that time better if I used it to improve my drawing skills, too. And right now the technique I'm trying to master (but I still suck at it!) is inking. I always loved the result of good inked art, and since I want to go on a comic book career one day, I figured that I should learn it as soon as possible.

But yeah, your art is great. Whatever you upload, pixel art or otherwise, I'll love to see it. In the end, they are all art, and that's what matters. (:

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umuu In reply to lucas-irineu [2012-06-29 23:11:20 +0000 UTC]

Yeah, absolutely. Lately I keep seeing indie games with pixel art, but the pixel art is... well, to put it politely, unrefined. They seem to have an otherwise competent artist, but said artist isn't versed in pixel art, so they assume that pixel art is just an easy retro style. A skilled technical artist isn't going to be able to paint a masterpiece the first time he picks up watercolors. But you also see artists who spend all their time doing one style but not enough time studying principles like anatomy, so their work suffers - I'm guilty of this myself, I don't really do studies like I should, haha.

I agree with regard to critiques. Kind comments are wonderful, but critiques are both humbling and useful. Sadly, this particular site isn't very conducive to critiques most of the time, but places like Pixeljoint and conceptart.org encourage those things more.

Inking seems very difficult. It requires very steady hands! But as long as you keep practicing your technique and try to work with long, steady strokes, I'm sure you'll get fantastic at it in no time.

It's funny that you say pixel art is so hard, actually - it's almost second nature to me now to the point where it's much easier than NPA for me, but traditional art is really hard for me, haha. My stuff seems to be a sketchy, unconfident mess, and I can't imagine how painting would go! I guess the relative difficulty of a technique depends on a lot of factors. I have always meant to try more traditional techniques, though.

Thank you! I'm looking forward to seeing your work as well

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lucas-irineu In reply to umuu [2012-06-29 23:14:55 +0000 UTC]

Say, do you have msn or some other kind of instant messaging? Your replies are getting very long.

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umuu In reply to lucas-irineu [2012-06-29 23:27:21 +0000 UTC]

Haha, I don't have MSN, but do you have AIM?

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lucas-irineu In reply to umuu [2012-06-29 23:28:10 +0000 UTC]

I do! It's lucasirineu. I think.

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