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 last year.
Here's the showcase I'm current going through:
For this new batch I wanted to make them more memey, and the next one to show off is this one called NOU, which I happen to use and say a lot basically whenever I get a compliment. E.g. when someone says I'm really good in a game (which only happens on occasion), I will hit them with a nou (pronounced "no, you") just to pass the compliment back to them. I think it's pretty self-explanatory.
Anyway, for the design itself I wanted my TacoCat to be holding up a card kind of like a reverse card from UNO, since the whole NOU is basically the same concept. But instead of the actual reverse icon I wanted it to say NOU but with the UNO font.
I found this reference for the card and paw:
I also wanted some cool guy shades to go with my TacoCat because I wanted a smug expression.
This is the sketch I ended up with:
I coloured in my TacoCat, drawing in all the fillings and the shades.
Then I got to work on the card. Thankfully I managed to find an actual NOU logo in the UNO font that I wanted online so I didn't have to draw it out myself. There's probably a font generator you can use as well so this made it a lot easier.
I coloured the card itself blue to contrast it and make it stand out, especially sandwiched between the logo and my TacoCat.
After adding in some shadows and highlights, we get this!
I thought this looked pretty perfect actually. I don't think there's anything I can think of that I would change about this. It looked pretty darn good and I loved it! I think I drew this on stream and I'm glad my chat liked it too.
This next one is also inspired by a meme/saying known as "ayo", normally in response to someone saying something suggestive, which of course happens a lot on streams so it's also a common emote on Twitch in general. I've started saying it a lot as well, so I thought it was only natural to have my own ayo emote.
I found these references but I basically wanted something pretty similar to the guy lowering his glasses so I went with that look.
I wasn't really sure how it would look with my cat though, especially with the hand, eyes and smirk. So this was my first sketch:
And after colouring it turned out like this, which I guess would've been fine but I also felt like it was missing something.
So just for fun I decided to see what it would be like to draw in the heavy-lidded eyes. After adding in some shadows and highlights we get this:
Honestly it looked somewhere between cursed and okay, and it did have the intended effect that I was going for, so I left it at that. My chat is also used to cursed things anyway; I mean I did make these last time at their behest so:
I think it ended up looking alright, I mean in the chat it looks like this and I just want it to be noticeable.
An aspect I've been focused on with these newer emotes is making them bigger and more obvious in chat. Initially I was focused on trying to maximise the space while keeping my full TacoCat in frame so that people can see it but it would make the actual expression look even smaller. With them more zoomed in the face becomes the focal point so it's easier to tell what it's supposed to be. Of course it really depends on the emote itself but I think this is a better approach.
Anyway, hope you like these two and tune in next week for more!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
