Day one was easy. Day one is just a declaration — you say the thing out loud, you feel the rush, you write a blog post about it. Day two is where the fear actually shows up.

Here’s what’s been running through my head on loop since I hit publish on my first post: what if this doesn’t work? Not in a dramatic, catastrophic way — nobody’s life falls apart if I don’t become a game developer. The fear is smaller and pettier than that, and honestly harder to sit with: what if I put in years of nights and weekends, and I just… stay mediocre? What if I’m the guy who talks about “starting over” and three years from now still can’t draw a decent hand?

I don’t have a clean answer for that. I’m not going to pretend I do. What I have instead is a plan, and the plan starts with admitting I can’t skip the boring part.

Why drawing, and why it scares me more than the code does

Programming, weirdly, doesn’t scare me. I’ve been messing with code long enough that I trust the process — I know that if I put in the hours, I get better, because I’ve done it before. Drawing is different. I have zero muscle memory here. Zero visual vocabulary. My stick figures have opinions about how bad they are.

That’s exactly why I picked it as the harder half of this journey. If I only worked on the thing I already sort of knew how to do, I wouldn’t be starting over — I’d just be continuing, with better branding. The whole point of Goodbye Pixels is doing the uncomfortable thing, in public, on record.

So — which course?

I spent longer than I’d like to admit falling down the rabbit hole of “best course to learn to draw as a complete adult beginner.” There’s no shortage of options, and every forum thread turns into a small religious war about fundamentals vs. style, traditional vs. digital, structure vs. “just draw every day and you’ll figure it out.”

I landed on Drawing Basics by Stan Prokopenko (Proko). A few reasons:

• It’s built specifically for people starting from actual zero — not “zero but you doodled in high school,” actual zero.
• Prokopenko has spent years teaching artists of every level, and the course structure is built around fundamentals — construction, perspective, proportion — instead of jumping straight into “draw a cool character” content that looks great in a thumbnail but skips the boring stuff that makes drawings actually work.
• It’s structured, with a clear sequence, which matters a lot to someone like me who has a very limited weekly window and can’t afford to wander.

I’m not sponsored, I’m not being paid to say this — I picked it the same way I pick anything for this project: cheapest path to real fundamentals, minimum fluff, maximum respect for my actual time budget.

Paper first, screen later

I’m starting this course the old-fashioned way — pencil and paper, no shortcuts, no undo button. There’s a reason for that beyond nostalgia: I want the fundamentals to live in my hand before I add a screen and a stylus into the mix. Digital art has its own learning curve stacked on top of the drawing one, and I’d rather isolate the variables.

That said, there’s an XPPen Deco 01 V3 drawing tablet already on its way to me. Once I’ve got some real reps in with traditional fundamentals, that’s the plan: bring everything I learn on paper over to digital, which is ultimately where the actual game art work needs to happen. I’m not rushing it — the tablet can sit in the box for a few weeks if that’s what it takes to not skip steps.

What happens next

I start the course this week. I fully expect my early drawings to be bad in ways I don’t even have the vocabulary yet to describe. That’s fine. That’s the deal I made with myself on day one — the goal was never to be good immediately, it was to actually start.

If the fear is still here in a few weeks (it probably will be), I’ll write about that too. The whole point of this blog is not editing out the parts where it’s hard.

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