God, me too. I hate the flick missiles. And the 3D hair. And, just, everything. :/

Yes, they don't look like Legos anymore.

I miss the old legos ¬¬.

; ~ ;

There were a tonne of sets I missed out on too. For a long time I wanted the old series LAAT gunship. It's on eBay now for six hundred dollars :/

Oh god.
I'll begin collecting Legos now, and in 15-20 years they'll cost 10 times more.

No but really, 600 dollars? Good god.

I'm only 15, so yeah that was one of the newer sets that I got when I was probably 11 or so... And I do miss all of the old Legos, the aliens and rock raiders and all the old Star Wars ones. But those were about 7 years older than when I hit the Lego age, they are rarities now! And 600 bucks for plastic? No thanks.

I have that exact model myself. I also have a tri-fighter and some smaller lego star wars bits.

Just a word in advance, I might be posting a lot of my crappy photos here in the next few weeks...

About the practising art to get better: actually I would disagree that the best thing to do is just blindly keep going and state the old quote "knowing is half the battle". Don't think the very first artists were somehow good just because they did a lot of art, no they were shocking, only until people started applying scientific principles to the way they painted and structured things did they start looking good (around the renaissance period IMO).

I think you can get halfway there by having strong technical knowledge (how light works, metallic surfaces, subsurface scattering, anatomy, how objects actually look/good observational skills, having a large visual dictionary etc.), but to become a master artist you need to pump out work and learn the rest through trial and error. But you can never be a good artist if all you know is technicalities, certain things can't just be taught.

Basically you should strive to keep learning new techniques/principles whilst pumping out as much work as possible. (most of the people that I have seen that increase massively in skill are attending university/college)

It is hard to find decent tutorials but James Gurney's "Imaginative Realism" and "Color and Light" are the best books I have seen.
Obviously these tutorials by arne are good too: http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/tuts/process.jpg
these videos by feng zhu: http://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL cover a lot of areas.
this is a page with the classic pixel art theory by Helm from the Pixelation forums http://www.pixel.schlet.net/
and some other tutorials:
http://www.youtube.com/user/sinixdesign
http://conceptart.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=42
http://www.gfxartist.com/features/tutorials

I don't really have any others off hand but I will say this about colours: Full 255 blue, red, green, cyan, yellow, magenta and white are never found in nature, also bright magenta and cyan are very hard colours to come by in nature. If you ever use any of these "pure" colours your images will look garish and just plain bad, you should always used more subdued/natural colours unless you know what you're doing; generally the colour that you think something is will be too bright if you are inexperienced, tone it down a bit. Also grass/foliage usually tends towards yellow yet every noob will always go straight for bright and dark greens, add a hint of yellow to the colour. Last thing: when trying to blend colours across the colour wheel grey will appear as an intermediate rather than a separate 'cluster', thus greying out/desaturating colours is, in some cases, a good blending technique.

If you want to disagree with someone it helps to find a statement that someone has actually said first?
Literally nobody has said that you should repeatedly draw the same thing and ignore criticism, what people have said is don't say you can't draw when you give up every time you try.

Everyone is basically saying 'keep doing art continuously', even your images pretty much say this, they do not allude at all to any form of learning or feedback to get better. I guarantee you will hardly improve if you (for example) just keep doing the same anime ♥♥♥♥ all the time. (well you might get better at drawing anime)

Fair enough, nobody actually said that you should blindly keep doing the same thing and I'm not really disagreeing with anyone here in particular; perhaps it should say "Well I agree that you should keep producing art but I do not think you should blindly keep pumping out work".

It really just feels like you are being pedantic just for the sake of picking a fight?
I mean in context we were all obviously telling people that they shouldn't just say "I can't art" and then give up. There were no other implications!

It seems sort of silly to start adding all this other stuff on top as if anyone has been misinforming anyone else!

Picking a fight? What? I was just offering extra advice, I even agreed with your point that perhaps it was worded incorrectly. I wasn't disagreeing with you, I was just saying that you should also strive to learn as much as possible as well because with only practice you will not really become a master.

I think there's a difference between doing something scientifically and doing it artisticly. What robolee is encouraging is for people to try and approach drawing scientifically and logically, which is probably most appropriate for people who find themselves unable to achieve it naturally. No matter what anyone says, there really are some people who can just do art, and they don't know how.

It doesn't just apply to drawing either. I've only been a musician for the past three years, and the only way I achieved it was by learning the rules and using them as a framework, whereas I see people achieve far better results without learning the rules in the first place.

Of course something made artisticly will still conform at least in part to the rules, and something made scientifically can still be art. The two sometimes aren't even distinguishable.

Actually what I would say is that people can only get better by approaching their drawings scientifically/logically, even if it seems like an artist is developing "naturally" they are still going through the same process of reviewing their art and comparing it to others, the difference is that they may not know the reasons that something looks better.

Imagine you are in the 10th century, you could make the best painting in the world but it may still not look believably realistic (for the sake of argument I'm assuming that a decent amount of realism is intended). Perspective and the way light interacted with people was just not understood and you wouldn't have that "better" painting to compare your work to either. Just look at some of these very early masterpieces: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... fixion.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... e_Magi.jpg Now tell me how the perspective seems to you. It's not right, nobody would say it's close to being right.

Describing modern art as objectively better than classical art is not going to earn you a lot of fans