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!
This next piece is actually a commission I did for one of my viewers from Twitch, who goes by Streetrata online. He wanted me to do an animated emote for him, which I wasn't too confident of since I was still relatively new to animation at the time. But I told him I'd give it a shot and since he just wanted a "simple" noted emote like this I thought it would be okay.
But it actually took some time to even get to this point while doing frame by frame animation. I bet this was done in photoshop using their special tools but I do all my art in Procreate on iPad so it took some time to get it right.
So basically the idea was to draw something similar but using Streetrata's (or Street) character which is a rat that looks like this:
I think this was done by another one of his artist friends and I thought it looked really cute! But it was going to be tough to animate it since I didn't have a reference for the pose he wanted. I started with a sketch:
Once he gave me the okay, I got to work on the sketch for the animation frames. He mentioned he liked the animation for this emote and I thought it did look better than the girl one since it has more movement, although it would definitely take more work. But since it was a paid commission I didn't mind making the extra effort.
This was the initial sketch for the animation, and I'm not sure why but Street thought the rat was shaking his head rather than nodding. I couldn't see it as anything other than nodding but I made some modifications anyway.
It's not as smooth as the reference gifs though but I tried my best. Here's the sketch after modification:
I realise the problem was that I had grouped the head and the body to move together so it looked weird with the rat nodding his head and shaking his body. Maybe that's why Street saw it differently. But once I made the body stationary it looked a lot better.
Once I got the animation down it was time to work on the colours! I colour sourced the references Street sent me to colour this one but I figured I would do a bolder outline since this was animated and it would look better this way.
Once he said it was okay, it time to colour each animated frame.. It took a while but thankfully I just had to make minor adjustments for each unique frame. Most of them are duplicates though so it wasn't too bad.
After colouring everything we get this! I'm not sure why it looks a little spotty as a gif with colour and the shadows looks quite odd unfortunately due to the movement. But then again it's an emote that will be 26x26 pixels in the chat so I think it wasn't a big deal. I think maybe I should've done clean shadows instead of using a airbrush but I made the mistake of combining layers so it was a little late for that.
Anyway, Street said he was happy with it so I was too. By the end of it I was honestly quite tired of it and just wanted it to be done. Thankfully Street was very understanding and amicable so he didn't complain at all. I can see so many mistakes that I'm sure a stranger would not be so accepting.
Anyway, here's the timelapse for this piece:
After I was done with this I promised myself I wouldn't do any more animated commissions, not that anyone else has really requested but I mean you never know.
That's all for now, thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
