Video courses to start learning game art?

Hi. I want to learn about artistry needed for games. I am an experienced developer but I know nothing about how to make my game look good. Every visual improvement I do is trial and error and I don't like it.

What I need is a list of course titles that are essential for a game artist. I am NOT talking about learning unity graphics (i.e. shaders, lightmapping, image effects, probes,...). What I need is art concepts like color principles, elements composition, scene lighting, look and feel, and anything related to 3d game art. I am particularly interested if someone could provide a list of course titles that could be learned from ground to top.

 

I can't think of a course list that will help you learn what you want to know. It's my experience that these come about through trial and error. And everyone's stuff stinks when they start out. I highly recommend these videos:

"The guy who painted this was a loser"

"The Gap"

Here's a solid resource for 2D digital art:
https://cgcookie.com/learn-concept/

And practice making things that you like. Replicate the stuff you like to look at. Verbatim. You'll eventually make it to where you want to be. It's a long road. But very highly rewarding.

 

Art principles are universal. Leave out the "game" aspect when you search for learning material unless you google technical stuff like normal map baking. What you need is art fundamentals. Pretend you want to learn how to paint, because that's essentially what you want to learn if you say you want to to learn about lighting, composition, color etc..

The best instructional art book that I know is "Problem Solving for Oil Painters: Recognizing What's Gone Wrong and How to Make it Right" by Gregg Kreutz. Another good book for beginners is "Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter" by James Gurney. Another one that has been recommended to me but that I haven't read myself is "Mastering Composition: Techniques and Principles to Dramatically Improve Your Painting" by Ian Roberts.
Imho the best forum for 3D game art is http://www.polycount.com/ . Lots of friendly and helpful people there. You want those that give honest criticism without fluff.

If you actually ever touch oil paint or paint everything digitally in Photoshop doesn't matter. The basics are universal. Get a Wacom tablet if you don't have one yet.

 

Thank you. Very good tips.

 

I'm not sure if they have anything in video but it seems likely there would be some.
Also not sure if you have any interest in pixel art.

Anyway, two of my favorite forums are at Pixel Joint and Way of the Pixel/Pixelation.

I can also tell you your art will look a lot better if you just slow down and take your time and go through iterations. As an experienced programmer myself who always had an interest in graphics as a hobby my biggest enemy was and is time (with the second being choice of colors... programmers tend to think in terms of saturated primary colors).

Having talked with a lot of artists and checking out a lot of tutorials and such over the years I learned one of the biggest factors is simply time. I try to knock out game graphics in minutes. Literally. Like that little vehicle over there in my avatar I spent about 4 to 5 minutes on it across three iterations. Over there is the final version (if you click on it you can see the animated gif... made for motion and looks better moving). The first version was knocked out in less than a minute. Also looked much worse because of that. A real artist can make it look much better and some would spend maybe 30 minutes or more to do so.

I don't know for sure if you are the same way just throwing that out for consideration. Because I can code very quickly I always expected art to be just as fast and for me it is definitely not. The longer I spend on an object the better I can make it. Not like a real artist would but certainly much better than what I knock out in 30 seconds to a minute. lol

 

Thank you. These are great resources. I will do that.

 

Do not know if this is what you are looking for but check out this video, the art piece starts around 1 h 47 min into the video.

Here is a few others: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=create+game+art