Superbly disconcerting and unsettling to be in April's mind, and that's what makes it fun! I loved the lab setting, as it gives all the dialogue a nice "sterile" flavor, pushed further and further into uncleanliness as we progress. The visual effects are also subtle, but contribute *a lot*.
Waiter! Waiter! More denpa VNs please!
Very camp, and that's good. From the plot, to the designs, to the music, to the eyecatches (nice btw), to the references, it all adds to a very enjoyable romp, with some toxic yuri spiced in for flavor.
It could use some more ATL (or when in doubt, classic VN combat effect CGs) to spruce up its action scenes, but I admire anyone who puts action into their VNs.
Very thrilling all the way through. I'm a sucker for the mechanics of going through archives to progress—it makes every new item alluring and necessitates close reading, on top of the story's natural allure and intrigue! And impressive on a technical level to implement too!
Voicing is also a welcome surprise, it and the music and sound is used to great effect building the atmosphere.
Amazing stuff! I absolutely love the music, I've playing the soundtrack on loop for a fair bit now.
Presentation/animation is wonderful, it really comes together for that disconcerting feel. I adore the sync with the music of "It All Blends." The mouse moving after certain clicks was a nice touch too.
And the ending—sublime.
Yes, you may update the zine with my transcript, along with the credit of course (and if you need to link to anywhere, the best would be my Itch.io profile https://brimbel.itch.io/, the second best would be my Twitter @Sasuke_Crew). I'm glad that my efforts in transcribing were not to waste and that something good could come of it.
(Transcriber's midword: Itch(dot)io has a 20480 character limit per post.)
Q6: What advice would you give to someone who is new to being a background artist who wants to become one for a visual novel project?
J: I would say, probably the first thing you want to do is find a place where you can get criticism that isn't mean spirited. Like, you don't want to share your art and then someone's like, "It's shit." It's not good for your confidence, and they might not say it that harshly but if they're essentially sort of saying that and they're not being friendly about it, so don't waste your time there. It'll stunt your growth.
A lot of people—man, there was this guy I encountered a while ago and he'd gone to sort of art school or something. And he's just like, "Oh, one of the teachers said 'I'm really, like, brutal and that's how you get better,'" and like no, no it's not. That's how you get a complex about your art. Y'know find people who are encouraging and stick around them, so that's the first thing.
And then specifically for background art, it really helps if you know just the absolute basics of perspective and linear perspective, because you need it to place the horizon line and placing the horizon line is very important for visual novels that have a text box obscuring part of the screen. Because, y'know, from the top of the text box to the top of the screen, you want the horizon line in between them in the center, y'know then it looks right. Because everything else sort of hinges on that as well, in terms of the art, like the characters they need to be in perspective, they need to hang on the horizon line and if you place it in the wrong place, they will either sort of look like they're kneeling or like they're really tall, it will sort of look wrong. Or if they're correctly put into perspective but your perspective has made it so like their head clips on the ceiling on the top of the screen or whatever. So that's really important.
There's so much stuff to learn about it but just try to make it interesting, I think. That's another thing I would say, don't get too caught up feeling like you have to—like it's very instructive to try to learn how someone else does something, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but also background art is—if you're a background artist, by definition whatever you create is a background, so you can do whatever you want. You don't have to conform to the way things are currently done. Might make it bit harder to get work but that's sort of another consideration.
Another thing, I guess, would be sort of the basics of color. Learning, at least, learning the terminology around it so you know what you're doing, like knowing what an analogous palette is, knowing what—when you have complimentary colors, like when you're—for example, something has a particular color, say an apple is bright red. Well, if you're shading it with its compliment you would use green, sort of dark to separate the green for the shadow, rather than black. That's the sort of basic thing of color theory.
I can't really think what else—oh, and maybe if you're moving from character art to background art, you probably already have some of those basics down. So if you do make that move and then you start charging for background art, charge something decent. Like, even if you're not that great at it, think about when you start a new job. You're not good at that job because you just started it but you don't get paid, like, dog biscuits, you get paid a decent amount. You still get paid the same amount as if you were competent at—because it's about the labor you are doing, it's not about the quality of the artwork. Someone wants your labor for a certain period of time, they need to pay for it.
Q7: Following up on that subject, what is something that you'd like visual novel developers to do more when they're commissioning background artists?
J: I've had almost universally good experiences. I think I've had exactly one bad experience, which was when someone was like literally abusive, but aside from that I've had pretty good experiences. I'd say the only thing—this is such a minor thing—when you're approaching someone if you want to commission them, just tell them all the information up front. Don't be coy, don't ask if they're available or whatever just—I mean, ask if they're available obviously, but also provide the information that they need to determine when they're available. Because if someone wants one background from me, that is different than if they want fifty backgrounds, they get a different period of time to make and that means I'm either, I might be available for the one background but I might not be available for fifty.
And then, another thing is like, certain artists are character artists and background artists. And so if you don't share that you need character art in the backgrounds until the first two have already been created and then the third one needs characters in the background or whatever, you're going to be in for a nasty surprise. So share all that information upfront—all the relevant stuff, like you don't have to explain the lore of every faction in your story, but just all things that would be relevant for the artists to know to get—inform you if there's anything they can't do or if there's anything that might be surprising to you. Y'know you don't want to find out that the person you'd thought was going to do the character art in some of the backgrounds—because some people hire me as a background artist, or commission me as a background artist rather, and they just assume that I can put characters in the background like, "Oh they don't need faces or anything," it's like, "Well I can't do faces or the body, so..." I mean I can do but it varies and I prefer not to do it.
And then some artists also have specialties, like mine is sort of more architectural focus whether it's exterior or interior. And when it comes to the more organic things, I'm not as strong, I can still do it but it depends on what it is. So I have a background in my portfolio that's a lake at night and there's a full moon. The moon is causing the mountains and the whatever else is in the scene, I can't remember, to be silhouetted, because it's behind all of them, which means I don't have to detail any of them which makes it easier to make. So depending on what the scene is, I may be able to do it, I may not be able to do it, or I may not do a good job of them and suggest passing it over to another artist. So just basically providing everything up front, that's probably the most important thing.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/AD165
Oh and then the other thing is, if you want something done at a particular time, have a contract. Like have a contract agreeing what's going to be done in what timeframe or whatever, because I have—and I think this is true of everyone, everyone has things going on in their lives beside the commission that you assigned them. So they're just going to do that stuff, that other stuff if yours is less urgent seeming. And by giving it a specific date, it makes it more urgent seeming and it pushes it up in the queue, right? Otherwise, I have all this—I always have urgent stuff to do.
Q8: What are your thoughts on animated backgrounds in visual novels?
J: It depends, I think they can be very good at times. I can't even remember if this was animated, but I remember there was this background in Clannad, to bring that visual novel up again—I'm sort of thinking about it, I don't think it was animated, maybe it was—and it's like of this field and a blue sky and it's like these things flying across the sky, like these glowing bits of light or something, I don't remember if that's animated or not but let's just pretend it was. That was very good for the atmosphere it was trying to create, it was trying to create this very reflective, sort of hypnotic almost, because the music was also very hypnotic, and it really stuck with me even though I didn't particularly—the visual novel itself as a whole didn't really land with me. I thought it was going to be more interesting than it turned out to be, because of those little scenes that really ignited my imagination. Particularly if you are trying to make something somber or reflective or whatever, having very slow repeating animations creates this sort of hypnotic sense. It's like water running, it just puts you in a different state of mind and that's good, I think.
What I think is less important is trying to fully articulate everything in a quote unquote realistic way. So having a background that's in a city and having cars go past, it's like, who cares about the cars? Like I just don't care when you put all these animations into these beautiful cars going past, it doesn't do anything for me. Whereas something like grass swaying gently, that can add something to a scene in a way that I think cars going past just doesn't. I know that sounds a little arbitrary like, "What's the difference between grass moving and cars moving?" I don't even know what it is, it's just I feel like there is this—I don't want to overstate it as like a huge problem or anything because I don't think it is. But I do think it's a little bit of a problem that sometime, people who have the ability to do something can't distinguish between when it's appropriate to do it or when it's not.
Like I don't think character's breathing animation, for example, matter. Like, who cares that's they're breathing? Like obviously they're breathing otherwise they'd be dead, it doesn't really add much. I feel the same with blinking, I don't know, I guess I have less of a problem with blinking maybe, breathing is just always creepy for me and it's creepy and unnecessary. Because you have these—animation is just a tool and if it's not used to get anything other than just visual spectacle, it's not—I don't feel like that's using the tool very well. Like if you're going to show someone breathing, you're drawing attention to the person whose chest is moving up and down. Well, make it something related to the scene, like if they're dying or something. Okay, maybe you want to show their last breath and sort of exaggerate that moment, then that's sort of an appropriate time to have like a breathing animation. Maybe a close up of them, in profile on the ground and like, "Ugh, this is my last words, blah blah blah blah," and you show their chest slowly going up and down and until it stops, that can be poignant and appropriate, I think.
But just, "I met this new girl at school and she's just standing here idly breathing at me," like I don't care about that, that's weird and unnecessary, I think. Also, almost all visual novel developers in the western context, y'know, we don't have a lot of money, which means they don't have a lot of time or don't have a lot of resources. Which means you need to channel them more efficiently than you might otherwise, and spending time on some of those animations—and I want to be clear it's not a very universal thing, I think it's just very contextual—you want to make sure you're choosing to work on what's appropriate.
Q9: What are some visual novels you'd like to recommend to listeners to take a look at?
J: Speaking of animation actually, I really like what Danganronpa does with the art. It's funny because like the animations like when you enter a new room they sort of fold up like cut outs. I don't even know if that's like thematically relevant, I can't explain why I like them but it does add something to it. Similarly with the characters, it really gets with this sort of flippant attitude which sort of goes with the whole Monokuma act, I guess we'll call it, and it goes well with the music and what not to create this particular atmosphere. Y'know I don't really recommend it because of that, I mean, it's a cool series. It's just one of those series, that every single entry, it starts out quite decent like for the first third or something and then it's just like ,"The Most Terrible, Awful, Horrible Event in History," like they always use that term, it's really awkward. I suppose it's a fairly mainstream title, most people probably already know about it.
I think another really good title is 999 , I really quite like that—I mean, all the Japanese visual novels that I'm thinking of, they all end in a more convoluted manner than what I think is necessary. But 999, the first entry in that Zero Escape series, is more streamlined than the later ones, I didn't really bother with the last one, it just got boring. But the first time you experience it, it's pretty nice and it's got that really cool soundtrack as well.
The other—I don't know, I don't really play a whole lot of a visual novels, I play a fair few things that are sort of proximal to like visual novels. That earlier title I mentioned, I haven't played it but it's quite short actually, The Cat and the Coup , it's not really exactly a visual novel per se because you're walking through it. But the presentation's very, again, in proximity to visual novels at least. And that was really beautiful and sort of somber.
What else? I mean, another thing that I found really interesting was—and this is not a visual novel—the beginning of Firewatch . That's obviously a game where you walk around and what not. But the opening part of it is basically a visual novel of sorts, or interactive fiction at least. And I think it's really—I mean, I wouldn't recommend it just because of the start of it, the whole game is good—but if you're a developer looking—because a lot of visual novels have very sort of convoluted, or sequitur delivery, they take a long to get to the point, they go around in circles all the time. I mean this isn't all visual novels, this is just some, there's a lot of good ones out there. I think the start of Firewatch is a really good, succinct way of telling a story, like it tells you, like I don't know what, ten, twenty years worth of someone's life in like five minutes and it makes you sad at the end of it. And it's only five minutes long, ten minutes long, and that's the start of the game, although I would really recommend looking at that and sort of reflecting on what that might say about certain visual novels that we think are poignant or sad and why they take twenty hours to get there. If you can get to the same destination in a shorter period of time, I feel like a lot of the time you should at least consider doing that.
Q10: What are your plans for future projects?
J: Well the current project I'm working on is The Bitter Drop by lady Isak. That's actually probably one of the most interesting projects I've worked on in terms of like, y'know there's a lot of interesting things to put in the backgrounds. Often times you get commissioned for present day stuff and it's whatever. Making a room that looks similar to all the rooms you've been in your life is not particularly fun. Yeah so that's the project I'm working on now.
I... don't have any personal projects I'm going to be working on in terms of background art. Sort of in the not-to-distant future I actually want to, I don't know what the right word is, maybe retire from background art. I suppose it might sound strange. Because I think usually when you see that someone's competent at something, they think—particularly if it's the arts, like in music, in visual art, whatever, writing—they assume it must also be fun for them. For me personally, I don't find it fun to do art as work. It's not my—it's not enjoyable for me, it's just work. I'm sort of making the transition away from it. And also, doing visual novel art—I mean, I'm sure most people mostly know this—is not particularly lucrative in comparison to any other regular job. And the cost of living is quite high in Australia in comparison to other countries, so I'm actually looking to transition into some sort of programming job, maybe web programming, so that's not particularly interesting to most people. And then I'm also working on my own website: StoryDevs , so that's also taking up a lot of my time.
Q11: Looking forward, is there anything you haven't experimented with or tried yet that you'd like to try doing?
J: Yeah, I mean, like I said—y'know, I was quote unquote retiring, or looking into retiring from doing background art, but—I will still do art for myself like I'm not tired of doing that, it's just in a work capacity. So there is definitely things that are interesting to me. Like, I really like glitch art, so maybe I'd sort of move in that direction, make something personal like that. I'm sort of interested in doing smaller, little projects for myself, that are like five minutes long, ten minutes long, fifteen, twenty, that are more about conveying a mood. And so I would be interested in trying more abstract art forms, because I don't really get any opportunity to do that when I'm creating background art because it's usually fairly literal even if it is more imaginative than it could be, it's still very literal. So I'd be interested in doing that.
And I mean, I guess the thing is like I've already tried 3d art and that's not really my thing, it's a very time consuming pipeline, I find. Yeah, like making something sort of similar to the art of, like, Transistor or something, that would be interesting. Yeah, that's all I could really think of.
Q12: Where can people find you and your work?
J: On Twitter, I'm @jakebowkett , that's j-a-k-e-b-o-w-k-e-t-t and that's my handle on a lot of sites, same on ArtStation and on DeviantArt as well. I mostly use Twitter, it's probably the best place.
Q13: Is there anything else you'd like to say to listeners?
J: Ummm, no. (laughter) I'm not sure, I was not expecting that question. Uh, live long and prosper? I don't know. That's it.
Q14: Thank you so, so much for chatting with me, Jake!
J: Thanks for having me, it's been a pleasure!
(Transcriber's foreword: If you, like me, find most podcasts nigh unlistenable to consume due to a myriad of factors both in and out of the control of the podcasters, than the idea of a "transcript zine" may seem like a godsend for you. Of course, to find out that the so-called "transcript" does not include a 36 minute interview out of the 61 minute podcast episode, then you might feel that it's very disingenuous to even call it that. In lieu of asking Katy to go transcribe it for me and all the other people who should duly raise objections, I decided to do it myself and post it here so everybody can read it. So to end this foreword: when's the transcript for episode 2?)
K: His name is Jake Bowkett.
(Transcriber's note: Question 1 "Jake, please tell listeners about yourself." is skipped.)
J: Well, I am artist and a programmer. And I mostly, um, in terms of stuff I worked on, it's mostly visual novels. Um. I don't think I really worked on any other type of game much. I sorta started out modding, well, modding games. First when I started was, I think, Oblivion and then Fallout 3. And then that sorta gave me the basic skills to get into working on visual novels. And yeah I live in Australia, um, I don't know how relevant that is. Um, and that's the basics about me as far as it goes in relation to visual novels.
Q2: How did you start becoming a background artists for visual novels? What was your journey?
J: Um. Well. I mean. When I was a little kid, I used to play Final Fantasy a lot, the PlayStation era ones. And they all had pre-rendered backgrounds. And I didn't ever have a plan to be an artist. I sorta thought—I didn't even really think of that as job, I guess. And I used to draw a lot. And then, some time around, I dunno, when I started high school or something I didn't really do much art. And then after college, I was, I sorta got into modding, and Oblivion and Fallout 3, they're 3d games, um, obviously. And so when I was modding them, I was creating art assets for them. Modeling them, creating collision for them, y'know, various stuff.
Then I discovered visual novels, and they actually kinda remind me a lot of the PlayStation era of Final Fantasy. Not in the sense that you go on a like big adventure or anything, but the sort of, I guess, the aesthetic of them was very similar in my mind. In the sense that they had this pre-rendered art and so the art—they weren't constrained by performance characteristics of the computer you were on. And music was very similar, and so that attracted me to them, because it was very nostalgic—
I actually discovered visual novels when I was—I was on Indie DB, I don't know if that's a very popular site anymore or if it ever was. But I was looking for JRPGs made by y'know western developers—I don't know if that's still a JRPG if it's made in the west, but whatever, that style of games—and that's when I came across visual novels. And then I played a few visual novels, I was like "This is cool, I want to make one of these or something."
And so I started looking around. And I saw, I think I saw an advertisement on my DeviantArt or something for y'know, "We need," I think it was like, "composers," or something. So I also write music and at that time I never made a background or anything, I just made these 3d assets. And I was like, "Well I'll join as a composer because I like writing music." And then when I joined I discovered that background artists were very very, at the time, they were very rare. This was around 2013 and at that time they were quite rare and it was even more rare for someone to make music, 3d art, again, at that time in the western development scene.
So then I sorta did dual duty of being the composer and artist for this small project—it wasn't small, it was actually one of those projects that was incredibly ambitious. Like uh, y'know, really large thing, the size of say Katawa Shoujo, which at the time was very recently released, in terms of size. And yeah then that's sorta how I become a background artist in about 2013 or the end of 2012. And then that project because it was so ambitious and because of y'know various things that went into, it fell apart. And then I joined another project after that, another similarly scoped project, didn't learn my lesson, and then that fell apart as well. Um, and then after that, I was like, "OK, now I'm just gonna freelance, I'm not gonna work for free on these projects anymore." And that's sorta how I started working on doing background.
Q3: When you're about to create a new background, what do you think about as you're developing the idea?
J: It depends on a couple of things. Firstly, if you're just doing it for yourself if you've got your own projects, which, I made a few little things for myself—they've not been released, but they exist. And when you're making it for yourself you don't have to have—like you can just sort of make it up as you go along, which isn't necessarily the best way to do it. But that's sort of what I tend to do, that's how I tend to work through things when I'm making them. Probably for most people it would be best to write yourself a brief. Because when you work with client and this is when the process is different, working with a client they will usually supply you with some sort of description because obviously you cannot read their mind.
And so for me, I personally prefer a very brief description that just gives all the important notes. You don't always get that—sometimes people will describe it in great detail, which is fine, I mean, they're paying for it. So if you have a brief, you sort of need to translate it into your own language if someone else wrote it. So I usually go through it and I make a bullet point list of all the things that I need to remember to do. Like, "Oh we," one background I made a long time ago now, "We needed a 3d printer in the center of the room," so I'm like, "Okay I need to build this background around that need." You identify all the needs, and then you sorta construct the rest of it around those needs.
And you also think of the constraints of the backgrounds, like the aspect ratio, I mean, and there's other constraints like the—most visual novels have a text box at the bottom there, occupies maybe between a fifth and a quarter of the screen, sometimes even more. And you need to remember, and I often forgot this when I was starting out or I wasn't aware of it, you need to remember to place the horizon line quite high, higher than you might think. So maybe like in the top 3rd of the image and it makes it look very awkward without the UI around it because you see a lot of floor, if you're in an interior, the floor is like occupying 2/3rds of the screen and it looks wrong. But in context with the UI overlaid over it, it looks alright. And you also need to remember don't place a ton of detail, or place things you're going to need to detail in the future, underneath the text box because it's not seen very often. Put all your effort into the parts that can be seen. Similarly, the center of the image has often got a character in front of it, or something or like a cut in or whatever, so you sorta want to weight the detail towards the sides so you're actually putting effort where it's going to be seen. And what else...
Yeah, I mean, another thing is you want to—you know when I'm designing something, I want it to be interesting for the viewers and also for myself because if I'm creating something that's boring to me, I'm not going to want to do it. And if it's boring to other people maybe they're not going to want to hire me, or rather the people who will want to hire me in the future are people who are interested in that boring work. And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Y'know I used to get approached a lot for school-themed sort of visual novels because my portfolio had school-themed things in it.
But yeah, you want to make it interesting and one way you can do that is just, you get your own reference images. Clients often supply their reference images to you but they're usually, but not always, but usually fairly literal in the sense of, "They want a city so they choose a photo or piece of artwork that similar looking to the city that they want," but they will never choose a reference image which doesn't exist. I know that sounds really stupid, of course, they can't choose something that doesn't exist, but that's sort of the point, like you're the artist, you're supposed to be creating this thing that doesn't already exist. And to do that you're going to need to invent and combine a lot of different things.
So for example, there was a background I was working on, again a long time ago. I only mention it over more recent ones is because I used a lot of reference images for it. And so it was for The Royal—I don't know what it's called now—it was called The Royal Trap at the time, I think it's been renamed The Confines of the Crown, or something. Anyways, it's by Hanako Games. And there's this exterior shot of the castle or the palace or whatever it is, and I used a lot of different reference images for that.
For example, there's this nice image I found of some sort of Middle Eastern interior like, and it had this star-shaped recess in the floor. Sort of like when you go into a house and there's like this recessed lounge area or something but it's usually a square—this was sort of a star shape and I thought, "That looked really cool." So what I did was I took that, and I rotated it 90 degrees, and then I put it on the wall. And that's just an example of the sort of thing you can do to take a reference image, and instead of using it literally you just take an element from it. And if you do that enough and if you find reference images that have pieces that can go with each other, that's sort of similar shapes or connotations or whatever, you can combine them and do that and make it interesting.
https://www.deviantart.com/jakebowkett/art/Palace-Exterior-529149128
Yeah, and the only other thing I'd say is you start big. So you start with all the big stuff, like, you know you're designing a city, for example, you start blocking in all the major buildings, anything in the foregrounds that might obscure things, and you try to find a general composition. That's another thing that I find super hard in terms of making backgrounds, it's probably the hardest thing—the composition, getting everything, the range, so that it's not awkward looking.
Q4: What would you say has inspired and influenced your work as a background artist?
J: Definitely, like I said, the PlayStation era of Final Fantasy. That's still a source of inspiration. Not even necessarily—again not literally, I don't literally look at the backgrounds from those games and then copy something from them, but there's a lot of creativity there and they're quite interesting to look at. You look at them and just some of the designs are so weird, and that's influenced the way I think about designing backgrounds, sorta going back to how I try to make the backgrounds interesting. One way you do that is—y'know making something interesting is not the same as taking something that people happen to be already interested in and then putting it in your backgrounds. It's about doing something completely off the wall.
From a recent background that I was working on, it was sort of this combination of Russian architecture, Soviet architecture, and Art Deco. And so i got a lot of Art Deco reference images and one of them was a car and it had this really interesting grill in the front of the car and I was just like, "I wish I could somehow incorporate this shape into the image," because it's a very Art Deco-looking shape. And so what I did was converted the basic shape of it into a building and so I just scaled it up 500x the size it originally was and changed it into a building—and obviously I had to modify a lot of things, which happens when you're using reference images. You don't have to use the entire reference image, you can just be like, "Okay, I got a nice shape out of this, I'm done with it." Sometimes I save reference images just for one little thing and it's taking up maybe 1% of the image, and it's just interesting.
But yeah, in terms of influences, I'm not really sure, I don't really take that much influence from other visual novels or other visual novel artists. There's nothing wrong with it though and a lot it I think is technically better made than mine, y'know technical sense and often times it turns out great. It's just not particularly interesting to me, especially the style that's popular in Japanese visual novels or artists imitating that style. Like I used to try to make my art look like that, but I'm just not very interested in it, and I sort of get bored.
I'm trying to think, there was—I mean, there's like a lot of different, little games here and there that influence the way I think about doing art. I don't know if it translated to anything tangible but I liked the art in Transistor, I thought that was really good. And there was another title recently that I just discovered called The Cat and the Coup, and it's got this sort of—I don't know what you'd call it—Persian miniature sort of style to the background art. A lot of these smaller—I mean Transistor isn't that small, it's very popular—but a lot of these smaller games are lot more influential to me than bigger titles. Like I don't care about the background art in Clannad or... I don't know, can't think of another Japanese visual novel now. Y'know there's a lot out there and they all have nice art and it's like, "Okay, cool but it's not my thing," so yeah.
Q5: Are there any tools, programs, or resources that you can recommend for background artists?
J: I don't know what I'd recommend for a particular tool, I would more... I think it's a lot easier when... y'know it's sort of difficult because there are so many tools out there. Y'know I definitely heard some good things about, I think it's Clip-something-Studio, I don't remember what that is.
K: Clip Paint Studio?
J: Yeah, that one. And then Paint Tool Sai, or however you pronounce that. I mean, I don't really draw that much, I mostly work in 3d art programs—and when I say programs, I mean program, which is just Blender. I've only use Blender up to 2.79, which is right before the UI overhaul, or the second UI overhaul. Y'know people complain about Blender's UI but it used to be even worse before 2.5. Y'know I use Blender a lot, I understand that it's frustrating for some people.
I think the main thing about your tools is that it doesn't really matter what tool you have, like you—it's more important to sort of understand the underlying principles of what you're doing and then that will give you—it will give you a basis for which to form questions. For example, if you know that you need the horizon line 1/3rd from the top of the screen, well now you have a question to google. You can google, "How do I change the horizon line position in Blender," maybe that won't turn up anything useful, but at least you have a question, right? You can ask someone—someone else will have used Blender and you can find them and you can ask them. Tools, they come and go, and they change over time as well.
Another thing with tools is you just need to focus on learning a subset of things. Like, nobody uses all the crap in Microsoft Word—or maybe no one uses Microsoft Word anymore, I haven't used it for like, ten years. But you don't have to learn every last thing in Blender or in Photoshop or in Clip Paint Studio, you just need to learn what you need immediately and then you just learn one thing at a time after that. I mean, that's sort of how I learned Blender. You learn how to move things, you learn how to scale them, you learn how to edit the geometry, and you don't really need all the other stuff right away and you can just gradually learn it over time, rather than trying to overwhelm yourself.
Another things is, like, because there are so many tools you can sort of get into this choice paralysis where you're trying to choose the perfect tool so you can save yourself all this time and energy. And it's like, you end up spending all this time and energy trying to choose the tool. If you had just chosen the tool—whatever it is, whatever piece of crap it is, you could choose, like, Paint and you will probably still get further than if you spend all this time trying to find the perfect tool.
But that's it, Blender's really good. (laughter) I really like using Blender—if you're doing 3d work, it's free and it doesn't crash all the time, so that's handy.
