I think edits can be perfectly viable as a method of learning if a person genuinly tries to match the quality of the thing they're changing up, there's a reason we still recognise a difference between "shitty" edits and "good" edits.
Now the big problem with edits is that they leave out a lot of fundamental skills and are in no way commercialy viable as a product due to the base not being someone's own propery.
One thing I'm
more than curious about is why we don't stimulate people to edit in ways that allow them to improve rather than just bashing the medium as a whole?
I think people
strongly underestimate the advantage/importance of having a crutch to help you up while you're still learning, as I can tell you, nothing destroys motivation more than only producing utter garbage.
Next to being a pixel artist I study to be a teacher, and I'll be honest with you, I can't really handle loud classes well yet, the moment that I've got a class that doesn't listen well, the lesson pretty muchs ends as a loud, chaotic whole, where must students probably only heard 5% of what I said.
On the contrary however, I've got a few extremely quiet classes that absolutely teach me
nothing about how to keep everything in order, cause they're calm and nice with minimal effort.
Do these classes teach me as much as the loud ones? No, does the fact that I can actually see my lessons pan out really well and the students enjoying them when everything's in order help me?
yes, yes, yes.
When all you see is "failure" when you try to build something from the ground up due to a lack of base skill, it might as well end up killing your motivation as a whole, while in contrast, if you can use a little footstool, say an outline, say a commercial sprite, to show that you've got
some skill in say, the area of colour choice, shading, whatever, this step really
can help.
I think there's a reason that, whether we like admitting it or not, most of us have done edits at some point early on.
There's tons of advice I don't see a lot of people give that's much more useful than just bashing edits, I know for example that most people who can
actually draw step into pixelart from a much higher level to begin with.
People who edit sprites aren't just
learning pixelart, they're often people who have to learn art as a whole, and the parts they don't learn from doing edits aren't the parts that require one to do scratch sprites, they're the parts that require one to actually have artistic insight.
If your anatomy sucks your custom sprite will look bad, if your lightsourcing sucks so will your sprite.
The whole "edits suck do scratch sprites" mentality will just lead people back into that area where they're stuck doing sprites they absolutely hate, figuring out their specific problems (if they want to fix them) is, in my opinion, the only really helpful thing one can do for someone still stuck in such an early stage.
Peace out.
-quick edit-
Quote:a lot of us did start with edits, but i think we can all agree that we didn't really start showing any serious improvement until we started scratching. that is why there's so much edit hate, edits are basically a really cuddly art study period that pats you on the head and says its okay if you stay there forever because you "aren't good enough to do scratch"
which is bullshit of course, a terrible scratch will get you a lot further than a decent edit
This is quite patronizing, I could do an edit that'd be more meaningful for me for learning purposes than a scratch sprite, several ones at that, it's
what people edit and
how they edit it that can pose a big problem, and the fact that for us as C&C givers, the edits can hide a person's most glaring flaws in art.
I remember
very clearly why
I stopped doing edits, I felt like my actual skill was confined by me doing edits, I couldn't do what I wanted cause I was confined by the constraints of the sprites I used as a base, sure I improved "most"
in my experience after I started doing scratch work, but I did a lot of
horrible horrible scratch sprites before I did some edits that, truth to be told, were far
far worse than the edits.
Working with other (commercial) sprites is not necessarily the best method, but it sure as hell gave me much more insight into what quality you
can reach with pixels.
If
anything I think that people should be persuaded to stop doing edits when they can obviously perfectly modify a sprite to fit in with the style they're copying, if a person
can't even make an edit look good, what makes you think they'll do
any with scratch spriting?
I find this complete anti-edit mentality very patronizing and more ideology-driven than based on the actual truth of things, it can be a perfectly fine
tool for a person's baby steps into spriting if it's taken seriously and given serious c&c.
Now as I said before,
once someone is clearly fully capable of creating edits that fit in
perfectly you can argue they have nothing left to learn from edits,
then they can make the next step.
