Art in the Game

Meet Susan! She works with instructor Anna as part of Game-U’s New Jersey Accelerate program. Susan’s interested in learning digital art, so Anna spends a portion of each class introducing her to the trade’s tools and techniques. See Susan’s first landscape!

During class, Susan uses Krita, a digital art program, to “paint” her scenes. For her landscape, Susan started with the layer tool. Krita’s layers allow artists to add more depth to their scenes by separating the art into subject-specific layers that stack on top of each other, creating a seamless finished product. To learn how useful layers can be, Susan worked backwards, painting the ocean and mountains before painting the sky behind them. (Yes, layers make that possible!) Digital brushes, like stencil and water, allowed Susan to experiment with different effects for both the water and the distant landmass. A sunset gradient applied to the background layer mimics the sun’s fading light, while tiny gaps in the ocean layer, which sits on top of the background layer, brings out “reflections” in the wavelets. Meanwhile, a sponge-like brush and some color variability on yet another layer achieves the illusion of a three-dimensional object series better known as clouds. With the scenery complete, Susan moved on to the focal point of her painting!

To create the painting’s focal point, Susan drew a houseboat with the help of Krita’s line tool, which constrains brush strokes to straight lines. Using wider, soft-edged lines in contrasting browns, which she later blended for a smoother effect, Susan created a tropics-style houseboat built of presumably local materials, like bamboo and thatch. The house sits on a round wooden platform floating in the water, and Susan used light-colored lines to show where the edges of the planks meet. She and Anna took special note of how shadows can help make a drawing or a painting more realistic, since the way light falls on an object, brightening some surfaces while leaving others in darkness, gives it depth. Susan’s finished landscape shows off how well she applied all Anna’s shading tips!

Beautiful work here, Susan. It’s exciting to see you develop your artistic talent! Thanks for sharing this landscape with us, and be sure to let us see your future pieces as you continue to learn more about digital art!