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!
We're continuing on with more free artwork redemptions from my viewers on Twitch; where viewers can use their channel points they've hoarded over the course of watching my streams to claim free art from me! I thought since I'm an artist this would be a good way to reward my loyal viewers, and also practise my art with different styles at the same time.
Anyway, this artwork was redeemed by one of my mods who goes by Akuji26 on Twitch! He's been helping me out on stream for a while now and we're pretty close friends; I've even done multiple art pieces for him for his birthday, including for his own Twitch channel like this banner:
But all those other art pieces were gifts, and this one was going to be different since it'll be an actual request from him. And he decided to honour our mod team in a way, with a recreation of the grave meme that looks like this:
Source: reddit
If you've been on the internet for a while you'd have seen this. It's a pretty old meme at this point but Akuji thought it'd be cool to recreate it with the characters representing all those in my mod team! I thought it was sweet, and I did do something similar before, like a group "drawing" of sorts when one of my other mods requested it for summer:
I could already tell this was going to be a huge piece. I did ask Akuji for some input since 2 of the mods didn't have an OC, and we figured it out. These were my references for this one:
I didn't really have a concrete idea in mind, other than drawing the grave in the middle and our characters around it. Akuji wanted to be the happy guy behind the grave so after some rough arranging and sketching our characters, I got this as a rough sketch:
I thought it looked meh, but couldn't think of anything better at the time so I just left it as is and went to outlining, which just exposed all the flaws in this piece so far.
I was not liking it, and tbh I was dragging my feet on this one for the longest time at this point since I couldn't come up with an idea for the background other than I wanted it to look like a graveyard. I didn't have a clear vision of what it would look like so I just left it for a while.
But the requests were piling up, so I went back to the rough sketch phase and decided to draft out the positions of the characters again to see how I could make use of the space better since the outline I had was quite asymmetrical.
I wanted to see if I could divide the background up into three sections, like foreground, midground and background. But realised it didn't work that way and the perspective was off.
After that I looked for some backgrounds I could reference and I found some cool-looking halloween themed ones, which was perfect since I actually did this back in October 2023.
I really loved the colours on these two backgrounds and went off of them for my own since I wanted a blend between the two. I decided to work on the background first and see how I could arrange our characters later.
I think this was better sectioning and the moon in the back gave some depth to the whole picture as well.
I used a splatter brush for some nice effects, added some trees in the background and a moon as well some spooky ghosts flying overhead and managed to get this:
This actually didn't take as long as I thought it would, and I was surprised with how well the background came out! I was super pleased with it and thought this piece was finally coming together.
I made some changes to the characters, but started with changing the grave since I thought it was too simple. Then I remembered Plants Vs. Zombies has graves and since both Akuji and I love the game it only made sense to include it. They had a pretty perfect one too, that said "Dead Dude?" on it, I had to choose it!
Now that I was more confident about where this piece was going, we could colour the characters! worked on them one by one, and for Momo I already had the tanuki statue from last time so I just pasted him in.
I also changed Mel's dress from last time since the previous outline looked too boxy to me. I found a nice vector of this black A-line dress that looked perfect and we agreed if there was one person to dress nicely for a "funeral" it'd be Mel, while I'd be sporting my own merch ð
Another funny thing I realised about Mel's dress: when I pasted the vector in the position was so perfectly behind Akuji's character that it looked like a cape and I thought it actually looked really cool, so I decided to draw it in too! ð
The DDR machine is for Seany aka DDR Boi. This is in reference to another meme we found about arcade players since he plays it a lot.
Comcbay was another tricky one I wanted to change. We drew him as a cat girl since he's into those, but then I thought it didn't look right. So I redrew him in a different kind of dress referencing this other cat girl character I found:
The rest of the characters were pretty set as they were, and the last was Chai as a titan. I think I was looking for buff girls (since he's into that) and a titan image popped up and we joked about what if I drew him as a titan instead to make it even more cursed, and voila!
I think it suits the Halloween theme anyway so it actually kind of worked out! This was the full complete artwork in the end, which I thought looked pretty perfect, and I'm so happy Akuji loved it!
The full timelapse is actually 11 minutes because this was such a huge piece. But here's a 1 minute version. Sorry about the small screen size but it's a short so..
Sorry for the long post but I figured we were due for one of these after the many short ones. Hope you enjoyed and thanks so much for reading!
If you're interested, I do draw on stream every Tuesday and you can even claim free artwork if you get enough channel points! We also play lots of interactive games so come hang out with us on my Twitch channel!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
