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.
Here are some of the more recent ones I've done:
I knew I wanted an emote that said GG for quite some time, but back then I didn't have the slot for it so this was the perfect time to do it! I found some good references for it too, since I wanted my TacoCat to look cool with shades and doing the fingerguns with it too, something like this:
This was my sketch but I was kinda iffy on the hands.
I tried to draw the left hand with the finger lines but it always looked weird so I just did the same hands on both sides.
For the GG I wanted it to stand out and be visible even at 26px which is the smallest size you can upload it so I knew I had to make it big and a contrasting colour. I really liked the blue on the reference so I went off that but in a lighter shade and I think it looks good!
I'm not sure if I should've changed the hands but tbh the emote itself is pretty small in chat so no one will even notice the extra lines. I figured it didn't really matter, and I think this looks okay still.
Another emote I really wanted to do was a LUL one since it's probably my most used emote on Twitch and Discord, which looks like this:
Source: reddit
It's basically a different or visual form of lol, and I do use it quite a bit. Since Discord is quite restrictive with free emotes the only ones I can use are my own, so I figured I might as well make a LUL emote as well. I guess a lot of streamers also do this though since I found this reference:
I guess streamers make their own version of Global Emotes (that are available for everyone to use) all the time since they're the most common memes. This one is more for me to use though.
I did have some trouble with the angle of the head though since I've never done a slanted version of my TacoCat before. It looked a little weird at first.
Thankfully I found a better reference to go off of and the second sketch was a lot better.
Next was just filling in the colours, adding some texture, shadows and highlights and in the end we get this!
I think it looks pretty good and quite recognisable as the LUL emote just with my TacoCat. Even at 26px you can still tell what it's supposed to be. I thought the mouth colours looked a little strange but when it's small in the chat you really can't tell. I did change the angle of the face a little bit though.
Overall I think these two emotes look pretty good. I don't think I can think of any changes I would make to them now. They look pretty simple but sometimes simple is best.
Here's a timelapse of these two emotes:
Thanks for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
