Hello everyone, my name is Li Sizhe, but my friends are more accustomed to calling me Frank. I am from China, Henan. It is a very densely populated province. There are 100 million people in our area alone. I think art is more like an indispensable part of my life, or something that can inspire me. When my emotions are in a trough or bored, creating or admiring other people’s art by inspiration always refreshes me. I am currently majoring in cs, but I have always been interested in art. I also thought about whether to devote all my energy to art, or to combine the two. But now I don’t have this plan yet. Maybe in the future I will choose art-related graduate majors.

Compared to digital art, I am more accustomed to traditional art. When creating characters for our visual novel last semester, I was more accustomed to drawing rough outlines and line drafts on my own drafts before drawing on the software instead of directly starting the drafts on the tablet. But recently I have been learning to use various Adobe software, including Photoshop and AE for digital art, photos, or post-processing. In essence, whether you use a brush or software, you pay attention to hand-eye coordination and stability. Needless to say, I still have a lot to learn.

In addition, I am also very interested in handmade art forms. I think these handicrafts that can be touched are an art form that is closer to life. It’s a pity that most of my handmade works are not around (because of the isolation, I haven’t returned to China for 2 years). This is the one I can find.

I think learning different software and watching other artists’ creation videos is definitely a very effective way to improve your art skills. At the same time, if you have the conditions, you can prepare a sketchbook, and you can draw on it whenever you have some inspiration. An inspiration you accidentally may be of great help to your future creation.

I think film appreciation is also a very effective method. You can pay attention to the lens language of the film, including composition, color toning, lighting that changes according to the mood tone, background and so on. In fact, similar visual art forms such as appreciating games or dramas will have similar effects.

I used unreal and RPG maker to make a 2d level breakthrough game in high school. The characters have different actions when sprinting and jumping, the purpose is to avoid traps all the way to the end. I am sorry that there is no available resource around me to show because of the epidemic.

In WPI, I only participated in game production in class, including design background stories and character dialogues for our group’s ARG in storytelling. And the text and art production of visual novel in IMGD1001 class. Someone in our team was responsible for writing the script, but he went on strike halfway through. So, I had to take over his job. However, this allows me to clearly know what kind of effect I want the text and art to present. I learned an important piece of knowledge on this project: the balance between the storyline and the game screen is very important. Some groups in our class have created very exciting adventure plots, but the art expression is too dark; there was a group created a very exquisite art form, but the story is too plain, so to be concluded, it is hard for player to enjoy.

I have always been fond of pixelated representations, including Stardew Valley, Terraria, Dead Cell and Octopath Traveler, Crusaders Quest and many other games. These games choose pixels as a form of artistic expression not just for retro. Concise design, prominent focus, and clear information are the advantages of this art form. These characteristics have largely inspired my artistic creation

All in all, I am not a skilled artist, at least not for now. I hope to make great progress in this course. Thank you for reading here and hope we can make progress together!

My friends’ cat~