Ryan’s Approved Art Books

With all the many resources available on the internet: video tutorials, articles, blog posts, and books, it’s easier than ever to acquire art knowledge!

Often, I get questions about my art books, so I made a list of books that I own to help anyone else out on their art journey.

Some of these books are books I studied in college to learn how to draw, many are books I’ve picked up from my local library to preview and put on my wish list to buy in the future.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

If you have never, ever drawn before in your life, this book will help you learn how to not only start but enjoy putting marks on the page.

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Returning to the Real World

I’ve made myself busy over the start of my new year and I already feel stressed out with all the stuff I put on my plate.

Currently, I’m video editing stuff from my art streams and game dev progress on Twitch, and I having trouble deciding out what to keep or dump. I’m doing what I can to not worry about doing a phenomenal job and just focusing on getting some clips made.

Along with this is some gift pixel art I made for my 100th follower on Twitch! Thank you and here’s to 100 more!

From my January 29th Twitch stream, I made a tutorial going through the basics of animation with a ball bounce! It might be rote, but it’s a good primer to get people to started just drawing objects multiple times and staying consistent with them. It went smoothly if you ask me, so I’m interested in doing more tutorials when I scrape up the time!

Most of my art time has gone to freelance and big book projects like Flawless Extra-Ordinary Super Heroes, so my sketchbook has been getting neglected. I’m trying not to let it burn me out since I am drawing “useful” art. But here’s art from the past few weeks that I have scanned.

I’m in this odd in-between feeling of having plenty of free time for personal projects but no free time because I’m taking on so many projects. I’m still not good at relaxing but old habits die hard.

My sketchbook priorities are going to the purpose of writing and rewriting the Blackmask story to a real plot. My programmer has plenty of character assets, so now I’m working harder at sketching environment assets.

I keep psyching myself out over how much this matters to me and I need to remember to ask for help and not take this insane stuff alone even if I think I’m bothering people about my obscure ideas that I struggle to explain.

Somehow, I’ve self-published and sold comics,yet I still feel like I’m stumbling when I’m trying to convey the overall direction I want to take Blackmask’s story. I’m sure I’ll figure out sooner or later, since the game will be edited and iterated on as it goes.

2/8/2021 Blackmask Recent Development Stuff

With the fruits of Adam’s labor reveals a new progress video for Blackmask!

This progress video done between the last video and now, includes new additions of Slopes, Dashing, NPCs, and Enemies. There’s some jank of course, but development still persists!

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