Game Not Included is all about using concept art and world building as a way to communicate and explore the self. Technically to do this you don’t need to use digital arts at all. Concept art can be done with a pencil and paper just the same as any other kind of drawing. So why complicate the concept with digital art?
Digital art tools can bring a landscape or character to life quickly, vibrantly, and in a way that you can come back to again and again. I like using digital art for teaching because it takes away some of that fear of a blank page, and saving your work to a cloud or hard drive means you can return to it again and again. Tweak it, create a copy, experiment, and leave your old ideas in-tact in a previous save. This flexibility makes iterating on an idea much easier. But it does rely on one very important principle:
Don’t like what you made? Save it anyway. Just save it and close it and stop thinking about it. It’s impossible to stress this too much. Don’t delete your old work, make yourself a trash folder and throw your unwanted work in there, but keep it so that you can come back to it later. You might not like how it turned out now, but with a fresh set of eyes you might find that some aspects of a bad drawing are still salvageable. And with digital art you can take the layers or portions of a design that you like and transfer it to a new file. This Frankenstein style of art-making teaches you to look back on your previous work and see value in it.
When a folder is your sketchbook, it becomes a living thing. Keep your physical sketchbook, of course, but back up your drawings as photos for faster reference. The digital arts workspace makes it easier to come back to ideas and iterate on them. Bring in color and shading quickly to make a place feel more real.