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!
One thing I like to do as an artist is to draw special personalised artworks for friends as gifts! Both because I'm a bad gift giver but also because I find personalised art a better gift than anything I could buy, like this one I did for one of my mods:
Anyway, this piece was for one of my viewers over on my Twitch channel who goes by Rakun! He's a big supporter of mine and contributed a lot to the community so I felt indebted to him and decided to gift him an art piece for Christmas since I missed out on his birthday.
Since he didn't have a proper profile picture on Discord, I thought of drawing him an avatar to match his vtuber one that is currently a work in progress! He sent me a mockup last time so I knew what it was going to look like roughly and thought it would look cute if he had a racoon friend as well. I looked up some cute racoon pics to reference but I wasn’t sure how to include the actual raccoon in, until I found this video of a guy who has a pet raccoon and he carried around his neck. It was so cute and I thought it was perfect!
These were the references I used, and thanks to pinterest I found lots of good anime hair references. Initially I wanted his pose to be like the screenshot I took; holding the raccoon's butt but then I figured it would look a little weird on discord since it crops to a circle on discord.
So I changed the sketch to just have the racoon on his neck and Rakun himself in a neutral position which I thought looked a lot better. For his shirt I went with a hoodie similar to the WIP he sent, but thought it'd be cool to add a design too but I wasn't going to outline that.
As a sketch I thought this hair looked pretty good, but once I outlined it it did not look as great as I thought.
Then I thought it might be better if I coloured it so I just went ahead with it anyway but it still ended up looking weird since it seemed like there was way too much hair.
I ended up using one of the sketches in the WIP for his hoodie design because I thought it was so cute even though it looked more like a tanuki than a raccoon. I also added Rakun in Japanese and made it look kinda like a ramen sign.
I initially wanted it to be a surprise so I didn't ask Rakun for his input but I also wanted him to like it so I just gave up the facade and asked him to pick some hairstyles he liked from a few options. Of course I didn't tell him the whole thing about me drawing this for him so there was still a small element of surprise in the end.
Consulting him did help a lot since he chose a much better hairstyle and I was so glad I asked him since I knew it he would like it now. So I went back to the sketch and redrew the hair. Most of it could still be kept though since I just needed to change the hair so it wasn't a total redo at least.
I already liked this one so much better! It was way less hair and definitely looked a lot neater and more like what Rakun actually looks like!
From there the outline and colour was pretty easy since it was mostly done already. I really liked how the snow raccoon turned out too; looking all fluffy and cute!
As an alt colour I did try changing the colour of the hoodie to something darker just to see if it would look good, but since I had to contrast with the raccoon on the hoodie it was kinda tough and didn't look right. The green looked good though so I didn't mind.
Even though I know he'd use a transparent background for his profile pic, I added some colours in the back to match a Christmas vibe to send to Rakun on actual Christmas Day. I'm just so glad he loved it!
In fact he loved it so much he changed his profile pic on discord immediately after I sent it to him and I felt so honoured he would actually use it! Even though that was my intention of course it was his choice whether he wanted to use it or not and I'm so glad he did and that I made his Christmas from this simple piece.
I might need to work on my shadows a bit but I thought this piece came out pretty well! Here's the timelapse:
If you're interested, I do draw on stream sometimes and you can even claim free artwork if you get enough channel points! We also play lots of interactive games so come hang out with us on my Twitch channel
Thanks for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
