A Gustav 30 in 30, #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball

[Gustav 6,468]

 

Pictured: my experience trying to talk to @gorlab about graphics as a beginner.

 

 

Anyone who's joined the VHL over the past couple years knows of my tendency to write some big articles. Heck, I'm putting everything I've got into making Gustav 30 in 30 what I want it to be by the end of next season, and we're heading full speed for my halfway mark. In Gustav history, we're right around S71. I'm trying to do these mostly chronologically, and that's pretty convenient right around this point because my first Town of Salem game started in March of 2020. That's also when I made this:

 

 

That might not look all that impressive--and it isn't; that was just me swapping out a logo, putting in a blank dark background, and abusing the Color Dodge tool--but I still remember everything about making it even though it was over 4 years ago. It was late at night, everyone else in my house was asleep, I was by myself on the floor of my bedroom in the very same spot I was when I first clicked the link to the VHL, and I had just purchased a subscription to Photoshop after hearing all about how I wouldn't be a real graphics person until I did that. I remember being a little disappointed by how much nicer Photoshop felt, because I'd previously sworn by just using Gimp for free, but considering that this was just a few graphics ago...

 

 

...one could say that I was pretty happy with the output. I'd been doing my best to get into the wonderful world of graphics for a while, starting out in Mississauga when I tried to crank some out for my players, and the wonderful month that was March of 2020 also gave me lots of nervous energy that I used on things like...oh, I don't know, being the founder of VHL Town of Salem. As well as a lot more graphics.

 

Before that point, I knew a couple things and could work my way around some basic commands. I could cut out a player's picture from a background (I didn't yet know what remove.bg was), I knew what opacity meant and what a layer mask was, I'd learned how to color swap and jersey swap and all that stuff (which is surprisingly not difficult to get on a basic level). I'd used the graphics channel on Discord as a resource, and at the time, it was a great resource to get extensive advice given mostly by @gorlab. Taking things and applying them and mostly just spending lots of time clicking buttons to see what worked made me feel proud of everything I made, even if it didn't look all that great. I'd made more and more for the VHL and was starting to explore affiliate leagues more closely too.

 

For the most part, I found that I really only wanted to do VHL graphics when I had nothing to say that week. I've always been more of a writer in sim leagues (and a "takes a long time to explain things" type in real life; I'm sure that's no surprise) because I feel that I always have lots to say about things that matter to me. So, especially with the understanding that I could just direct people to better sig-makers, I'd really only make something occasionally and my progress was slow.

 

Something that took off for me, though, was shamelessly doing my weekly (or in some cases, monthly) Player Brand in the EFL for affiliate checks here. In the EFL, it was almost the opposite of the reason why I didn't really catch on with my graphics here. I didn't follow the EFL all that closely and really had nothing at all to say--so weren't graphics the perfect thing to do? I got to work and was pretty happy with some of the output. Here's my favorite out of the ones I made of my own player when I was still a beginner:

 

 

Which isn't perfect, but it's better than either of those I've shown you so far. It was only a few graphics into my time out there and I started making real improvements just about every time I opened Photoshop.

 

I won't harp on my time in affiliate leagues too much (especially because that's a story for another installment), but most of my best work happened outside the VHL. I made a graphic here and there, and lost a league contest or two...

 

 

Made for a "make a recruitment graphic" contest. I was really proud of this, posted it on Discord, and was immediately told that everyone looks super yellow--fair point.

 

...but that's mostly it as far as the VHL is concerned. Digging through my old folder, I'm finding that a really surprising amount of my best work was made for the IHL, a now-defunct GM league created by @enigmatic at some point in the late S60s that I was invited to at some point in the S70s. We were only 8 or so members at any one time, but people really seemed to love it when I made them a graphic and I got more positive feedback than I did on most of my stuff in larger communities. I've got a big lineup of images that I'll dump in a future article, but (in my opinion) the best graphic I ever made was this one for the IHL:

 

 

Clearly better than the Justin Graves one that probably led to Justin Graves almost immediately going inactive on me.

 

I bring up my history with graphics here because it's a huge example of a real-life skill that the VHL can give someone. I have certainly improved as a writer in my time here, but why bring up a list of my favorite articles? I've also built up lots of spreadsheet skills, but why bring up my favorite spreadsheets? Graphics are convenient. They're visually appealing. I've got all of them in a folder in chronological order. And it's easy to see improvement. I never touched the top tier of sig-making, but what I have in my folder (140 sigs, maybe 40 of which are duplicates before and after lighting adjustments) is about the equivalent of making one thing a week for two years. I'd imagine that more would have been reachable had I not burned myself out of affiliate leagues at one point, but I'm glad what I've done. Because, honestly, you would not believe where basic Photoshop can take you in the real world. I'm Vice President of my student organization off the back of a campaign poster I made myself, I design flyers for that same organization for events, I helped my lab get recognized in a photo contest, and I've developed a reputation for making memes that would not be possible without ever having opened that software. Graphics, somehow, have made me a little bit more popular.

 

Ironically, disappearing into the Internet to escape real life has taught me lots of things about real life. If I'd never joined the VHL, there's absolutely no way that I'd have ever learned how to edit a photo. I'd also never have learned how to organize data until school forced me to. But being a nerd led me to learn nerd things for sim league purposes, which just made me a better nerd. And I'm not sure whether I'll ever consistently make graphics again (and I know for a fact my skill has dropped off a bit), but it's something I put lots and lots of time into that fundamentally affected my perspective on both sim leagues and real life over that time. I think that deserves to be talked about somewhere at least, and I'd encourage you to reflect on the ways what you've done here has carried over into your life as well if you haven't.

 

 

Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience:

 

#1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name

#2: Can't We All Just Get Along?

#3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway?

#4: The House That I Built

#5: Can We Fix It?

#6: American Beauty

#7: The Kids Are Alright

#8: Dogs In A Pile

#9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake

#10: This Old House

#11: Go Directly to Jail