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 currently going through:
For this new batch I wanted to make them more memey, and this next one is actually inspired by a pretty famous cat meme that looks like this:
Source: reddit
This is one of my favourite cat memes and I love his smile. Every time I see a cat photo online with a smile like this I would share it with my partner and we would laugh at its silly smile.
Anyway, I saw an artist rendition of this cat that would be a perfect reference for an emote since I also wanted to combine it with the "oke" meme:
From there I came up with this sketch:
After that it was pretty simple, I just had to draw in the eyes, nose and paw.
I was debating on whether to draw extra lines on the paw since cats don't really have knuckles but it just ended up looking like my TacoCat was holding its paw out.
It didn't really look right without the lines either, so eventually I just settled for this:
I think it looked alright, and this is how it looks like in chat at 56px. As long as it looks recognisable in chat I think that's the most important part, so I left it at that.
The next one is actually an updated version of an existing emote I shared about previously - the rage emote, that previously looked like this:
It looked fine for a while, until I got inspired by some anime that I watched and realised it could look better if I made it more anime-like like these references:
I really liked both these faces but figured it would be more recognisable to do an open mouth like the girl so this was my sketch:
Then I worked on the outline and colour, using a calligraphy brush for the line work.
I added the rent tint on the face as well as the rage lines and I think it looked pretty good. I changed the fire in the eyes to make it more cartoony as well. After some extra shading and highlights, we get this:
I thought this looked pretty good but now that I look at it, the red tint kind of blends into the tomatoes too much. I think a lettuce layer behind the taco would make it look better with the colour contrast, but unfortunately I used the same template for the taco on all my emotes to make it consistent so it would be difficult to change it just for this one.
Twitch has animated emotes now, and they also have an in-built Easy-Animate feature with some default motions that you can add to static emotes, and I thought the Shake motion would be perfect for this Rage emote:
In the chat it looks like it shakes around which I thought was good. I'm actually considering to make the face look bigger for this one like I did for the other emotes in this showcase, but I think it would look better if I moved the lettuce forward as well. Maybe when I have the time to do that I will work on it.
We have one more in this showcase so tune in next week for the finale!
Check out my previous post in this series!
