Hey Hive!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
So if you missed my last couple of posts, I started sharing some art I did for my Twitch channel in the form of customised bit badges! Badges are special icons that users can put beside their name in the chat that will show up on different Twitch channels and if you send bits/cheers on a channel you get a special badge too! Each bit is 1 cent, and there are so many bit badges up to 5 million bits?!
I notice not many streamers do it, but I thought customised badges would look really cool so these were the ones I did!
So I've shared about 2/3 of them now and we're up to the 50K bit badge now! We continue on the whale series I had going, since "whaling" is a term on Twitch we use to describe someone who spends a lot (typically in games). I had to think of another type of whale and one that immediately came to mind was the narwhal! I wanted each badge to look unique especially since it's pretty small in the chat, so I wanted them to look very distinct in terms of features and colours!
I referenced quite a few different cute narwhal drawings and couldn't really settle on just one so I combined the features from all of them! And after adding cat ears, this was what I ended up with!
And since we didn't have a blue badge yet I thought this would be the perfect time to make it baby blue, which is one of my favourite colours! I think it turned out pretty nice and cute! Here's the timelapse:
Initially I wanted to go for the ice cream cone look for the horn since I liked that idea I saw on one of the references I found. But when I tried it it didn't really work with the cat ears and the colours seemed to clash so I ditched that idea. It did look cute though but I wanted it to be mainly blue this time. And it did still end up looking pretty cute anyway so it's all good!
For the next one I wanted to do something special and started expanding to different types of sea creatures and I thought a mermaid would look adorable, especially with cat ears! Or I guess to be more accurate it would be a mer-cat since it is still a cat just with a fish tail.
I was going for something like the mermaid from Stardew Valley in terms of colour scheme and I actually found this very cute and lovely drawing of a cat mermaid that was nearly perfect! I initially wanted to draw her in a sitting pose with the tail going up somehow, but figured I didn't really have a good enough image in my mind for what I wanted. So I ultimately went with just tracing the pose from the reference.
But after I finished the outline and colour I actually thought of making it even better by drawing a pearl and making it look like the cat mermaid (or Mer-Cat) was "holding" it. Especially since she already has one paw up. So I changed her paw a little and added a rose-gold pearl with a shine and I think it came out pretty perfect!
I also changed the colours a little bit to make it more vibrant and blended the different tones in the hair to make it more seamless compared to the reference picture. I think my tail didn't come out as well but it was alright. This one was definitely one of my favourites so far because of how colourful it was! It was definitely the most glamorous one too! Too bad no one will likely get to this point since it requires 75K bits which is $750! A totally insane amount that no one will reach. But it's all good because I still had fun working on this!
Here's the timelapse:
And it's actually precisely because I know no one will get to use these bit badges that I'm being so laxed about tracing. I do try to change it up with colours and poses though. But because it's only ever seen in chat at about 18px big, I figured it wouldn't make much difference whether it was a complete original or not. Besides, I'm not exactly profiting off these since they are just a bonus perk from giving bits and I'm not selling these as "my designs" so.
Looking back at this series again actually inspired me to make more to add to the cat-whale series though, so maybe I'll work on more varieties of cat-whales to add to my collection just for fun!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Art Attack! #111: A Cat-Whale and Cat-Orca? 🐋
