I've previously lamented in this blog my complete lack of artistic ability. Several times, in fact. I wish I oculd create illustration of the creatures and concepts described in the Wongery, that I could portray them as I envision tham and make eyecatching visuals to bring attention to my work, but unfortunately I am terrible at drawing. As I've said before, it's not for want of practice; I've loved to draw since I was a child, and I spent a lot of time on it, but while I suppose my artistic skills have improved somewhat, they're still not anywhere near what I'd consider remotely passable.
But the fact that I am bad at something does not stop me from trying to do it anyway. If it did, I guess I'd never do anything. And while I doubt I'll ever consider my art good enough to make illustrations for the Central Wongery mainspace, I'm still going to try and make art for some of the subspaces I'm less picky about, if only because I don't have the money to pay real artists to do it. That will eventually include, as I've previously mentioned, illustrations for cards in the CCG space. But it will also include content for the Asset space, the subspace for assets for uses in video games. Probably one of my first priorities for the Asset space will be content for the latest version of RPG Maker. Which of course would mean making pixel art. Which is something with which I have very little experience. So I've started a Udemy course on pixel art.
And, much to my surprise, I think I... may not be completely hopeless at this.
I'm not going to post here any of the pixel art I've created so far, because I've already posted it elsewhere under my real name and I'm still intent on avoiding revealing my identity for no good reason whatsoever. But it's... well, it's not awful. I mean, it's not great, but it's a whole lot better than I thought it would be. Sure, obviously it's not of professional quality, and I seriously doubt it ever will be, but it's... okay. It actually looks kind of okay. And that's much more than can be said about my non-pixel art.
I don't know. Maybe it is awful and I'm just bad at evaulating pixel art. That's very possible. And I'm currently only about a quarter of the way through the course; maybe as I get to the more advanced techniques I'll realize they're way over my head. But at least for the moment, I'm feeling... significantly more positive about my abilities with pixel art than I expected to feel.
I'm not saying I'm going to put any pixel art up on the Assetspace anytime soon. It's something I definitely intend to do, but it's not super urgent; when it comes to adding content to the subspaces, I think the RPG space is still the one I want to (And—and I know I keep saying this, but it keeps being true—I really, really have to step up the pace of my writing new articles for the Central Wongery.) But at some point, I hope before the end of 2025, I do intend to start adding content to the Assetspace[1]. And when I do, it's looking like maybe, just maybe, that content won't be quite as embarrassingly incompetently executed as I feared it might be.
Or maybe it will be even worse, and looking back at this blog post I'll be embarrassed that I ever thought it wouldn't. But let's hope not.
- ↑ Also, as mentioned briefly in a blog post last June, I do in time intend to make a few RPG Maker games of my own set on worlds of the Wongery—right now I'm thinking one set on Jhembaz and one in Meliauth—but that'll be further down the line.