Art Attack #206: Feline Cute with these Cat Emotes 😽

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 onto another series of Twitch emotes! I've shared about my streaming journey on Twitch in multiple posts and the art I've done both for my Twitch channel and for my viewers. Earlier this year, Twitch announced that Affiliates (such as myself) would get access to many more emotes slots so I was scrambling to draw new ones to fill them for the first half of this year.

We're down to our last three emotes for this showcase actually! The first of which is a simple UwU one, which I was kind of hesitant to make but it does look quite cute so I figured why not. I'm not sure if I need to explain what UwU is, but according to Wiki,

uwu, also stylized UwU, is an emoticon representing a cute face. The u characters represent closed eyes, while the w represents a cat mouth. It is used to express various warm, happy, or affectionate feelings

Stylized_uwu_emoticon.svg.png

Since my avatar is already a cat this was pretty much a no-brainer. The only thing I really added was the arms since I wanted to sort of combine it with a squish cheeks emote that I've seen around that also looks really cute, something like this:

Source: deviantart

Initially I was going to go for an anime-eye look but ultimately decided on an UwU one for the memes.

Here's the sketch:

After outlining, colouring and some shading and highlights, we get this!

It's a pretty simple emote so I got it done quite quickly. I wasn't sure if I wanted to put in the blush but figured I'd at least put in some colour on the cheeks, but maybe I should've changed it to pink? I think the only reason I didn't was because of this next emote which is the headpat one!

Headpatting is apparently a thing on Twitch and my viewers can actually use their channel points to give me headpats on streams if they want. It's also quite cute so I thought I'd make an emote of it since I have extra slots to spare.

Here's the reference I used:

I wasn't too sure on the angle but I think positioning it diagonally does utilise the space most effectively. I wasn't too sure about the hands though.

I also wanted to change the hand to a paw since I thought it'd be really cute and unique, not to mention on-brand with my avatar also being a cat.

This was the outline I settled on:

And after colouring, shading, and adding a blush and hearts, we get this!

It still looked a little awkward with those disembodied hands and maybe I shouldn't have included my own TacoCat paws in there but I wanted a similar expression. But now that I look at it again, it does feel really weird. I think the standard headpat emotes look something like these, and maybe I should've just went with that instead, but I felt like I needed to show off the Taco. I think I might redo this one in the future even though it's not even that old yet.