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!
So I've been streaming on Twitch for quite some time now and it's been fun trying out different games and making new friends! I was also fortunate to become a Twitch Affiliate only a month after I started streaming!
One perk of being an Affiliate is you can create custom rewards for your chat to redeem with channel points. Since I'm an artist I thought I'd reward my loyal viewers with some free artwork!
So we're still on our series of me sharing art pieces that my chat redeemed using channel points since I got flooded with requests when I first put in this channel reward so I was busy for quite some time. I thought it was quite an expensive reward that no one will really redeem but boy was I wrong!
Anyway, this next request was actually made by one of my moderators who goes by Momoringuu, aka Momo! He was also one of my OG followers who found my channel back in my first month or so of streaming, and he's helped me out a lot! So when he requested an emote for his channel I was more than happy to oblige.
Momo has an OC which is a racoon/tanuki which I think suits him a lot. Initially when he was thinking of a character for his vtuber personality I suggested a tanuki since he has a cuddly bear-like personality and look. And when he showed me his vtuber model I thought it was awesome!
So when he requested an "ahegao" emote it seemed pretty self-explanatory. He does write a lot of questionable stuff in my chat so it was no surprise. If you're unfamiliar with ahegao it's very common in anime and I think my reference pics will best explain it:
Anyway, I found this really cute racoon picture as well and thought it was the perfect shape since I wanted it to be a little chibi-fied. Momo's vtuber model is only one shape but for the emote I only have 500x500 pixels to work with so I wanted just the head.
This was the initial sketch I came up with but I wasn't very sure on the shape and it looked quite off still.
I decided to just make it more rounded instead and it looked a lot cleaner and nicer imo.
Most of the details were going to be in colour so the outline was pretty simple; probably the simplest one I've done so far.
The main part of this piece was definitely the colouring but it was relatively easy since there weren't that many colours either. I did add quite some shadows and highlights to give it more depth while also trying to be accurate to his model. Eventually we get this!
This was actually pretty fun to work on and was a nice break after the last couple of artworks which were a lot bigger pieces. I think I finished this in just an hour or so after getting Momo's feedback on the sketch. Despite the nature of this piece I'm really glad with how it turned out and thought it looked great!
Here's the timelapse:
I'm so glad Momo liked it too! I wasn't sure if Twitch would allow the drool since they've changed their emote guidelines and did not allow "-gasm" style emotes obviously because of the nature of it. One of my own emotes actually got rejected because of that. But so many streamers have circumvented the restriction using some creative methods so these type of emotes are still everywhere on the platform, and are popular with users.
Momo doesn't really stream anymore but I'm glad I still got to help him out on this and it is still on his channel to this day. Maybe one day when he decides to try streaming again I'll be able to use it in his chat.
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
