Art Attack! #101: Lovey Dovey Emotes! 😻

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!

Since I started streaming on Twitch, I hadn't had much time to work on art tbh. But after just a month, we actually manage to get Twitch affiliate! And if you're not familiar, affiliates get to earn money from Twitch through viewer subscriptions, ad revenue and the like. And subscribers get benefits such as an ad-free viewing experience but also access to unique emotes from the channel!

So the next couple of art pieces I had to work on were said emotes! I didn't really want them to be game specific although many of my viewers wanted me to do Genshin Impact-related emotes since that was my main game. However, since I was planning to be a variety streamer I decided to make my emotes based on me, i.e. TacoCat, instead.

So these were the first couple of emotes that I worked on! Of course, starting with the simple and basic TacoCat:

I don't think I need to explain this one since it's just basically the same as the one I use on my endslate. I did redraw it to make it to scale in high definition of course, but the colour sourcing was easy since I already had a reference.

Here's the timelapse:

The next emote I wanted to work on was definitely a heart/love emote! It's probably one of the most common emote that I use since I didn't want to waste an emote slot just to say hi. So a heart one would be more versatile for sure.

So this was the one I came up with initially:

It was alright I guess. I was initially wondering if I should just do 1 with a big heart like everyone else does, something like this:

Source: artstation

But I didn't want to be too similar to everyone else. I actually wanted to draw with heart eyes instead but settled for a smiley expression.

Here's the timelapse:

But I was still kinda iffy about it. My chat really liked it, which I was happy about but because emotes are pretty small in Twitch, probably only about 18pixels on average, it was pretty hard to see the hearts in chat. So I thought of making some changes. I still wanted the floating hearts around though.

Eventually I came up with this instead:

And here's the timelapse:

I kinda left this one at that for quite some time now. But now that my art has improved I'm thinking of revamping this heart emote again to make it look.. more professional I guess? Maybe a thinner border on the heart, better highlights and paw positions, maximising the pixel space, etc.

Something more like this would maybe be better:

Source: artstation

I do still want to keep the blush and the face and floating hearts though. And since my 1 year anniversary on Twitch is coming up and I'll be able to get follower emotes soon, I'll use that chance to rearrange, revamp and create some new and exciting emotes for my supporters! Sounds like I'll be quite busy for a while but I can't wait to work on better ones!

Thanks so much for reading!