Art Attack! #120: A Judgemental Dra-Gao? 🐲

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 if you weren't aware, I've been streaming on Twitch for quite some time now and it's been fun trying out new games and making new friends in chat and with other streamers too! And I was fortunate enough to have loyal viewers whom enabled me to get Twitch Affiliate only a month after I started streaming!

It's been a wild ride and now I'm actually sponsored with a tournament hosting platform, so now I can even host my own tournaments every month!

Anyway, Twitch affiliates get the benefit of having channel points and anyone in chat can redeem them during the stream if they have enough channel points. And since I'm an artist I thought I'd reward my loyal viewers with some free artwork!

Of course, it doesn't come cheap and my viewers will need at least 150,000 channel points to get it! It seemed like an impossible number at the time, but now my moderators have hoarded so much points it's insane.

One of the first couple of people to redeem it was actually my streamer friend, Gaojisan! He's a really cool guy I met through other fellow Genshin Impact streamers and he also requested that I design an emote for him to use on his channel! He's very interested in Japanese language and even plays Genshin completely in Japanese to improve his reading and listening, and even teaches his chat some Japanese occasionally!

For the emote, he initially had the idea of incorporating my tacocat avatar into the emote somehow, because he wanted to promote his streamer artist friends. I was kinda hesitant about that because although it was a really nice sentiment, I was concerned his chat may not like it since most of them don't even know me. And since emotes are exclusive to subscribers who either pay money to sub or use a free prime sub, I rather them get something uniquely Gao that would match his channel.

After hearing me out, he reconsidered and requested a Gao emote with a judgemental expression. I’ve definitely seen him with that face before so I thought that was an excellent idea! He actually created a little dragon character to represent himself which he calls "gao" so that would be the character to use for his emotes.

This is what his dragon character looked like and I thought he looked so cute and was really well done, especially considering gao doesn't have any experience with digital art.

I asked Gao for as many references as he could give me and he very helpfully delivered! So basically I had to draw his dragon character making a judgemental expression, something like this:

It was going to be kinda tough drawing his dragon face in this angle but I tried my best and ended up with this sketch. And I was kinda iffy on the perspective since I wanted his to be leaning somewhat, but still flat enough to maximise the space since the actual emote size is pretty small.

So the challenge was not only the perspective but also making it obvious enough to be seen as an emote.

After a few revisions and some feedback from Gaojisan, we got something like this.

And then I decided his arms still looked a little weird like that and thought drawing him with his arms crossed would be better, so..

I asked Gaojisan what he thought and he loved it! He also thought it looked so much better that way and matched the expression a lot more. I think I could've drawn his arms a little better now though.

I left the eyes last since that was probably the most complicated part of drawing Gao. Even though he traced it it was really well done and definitely the past I was most concerned about replicating. I think I did okay though?

His eyes are not as big compared to the original Gao character since he's supposed to have narrowed eyes like he's judging you and I thought it looked pretty good! Maybe I should've added some eyebrows or something but Gao was happy with it so we left it at that.

Here's the timelapse:

I do art streams sometimes and play a bunch of different games with chat almost everyday, so stop by my Twitch channel if you wanna hang out with us! Who knows, maybe you can claim a free artwork from me next time?

Thanks so much for reading!