Art Attack #188: Cute Slimy TacoCat?

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 this was from way back in Apr 2021, a few months into my journey of streaming on Twitch where I was lucky enough to be found by some viewers and started gaining a small following in my first few weeks! After just a month, we actually manage to get Twitch affiliate! If you're not familiar, affiliates get to earn money from Twitch through viewer subscriptions, ad revenue and the like. Subscribers get benefits such as an ad-free viewing experience but also access to unique emotes from the channel and a special subscriber badge next to their name in chat!

I realised that I shared the first batch of emotes and bit badges that I did long ago, but I didn't share the sub badges I did as well. Twitch gives some generic sub badges that look like just a star in a purple square which I thought was very plain and boring. Since affiliates get the chance to customise the badges I thought this was a perfect chance to get creative!

I remember for the first badge/emote one of my viewers suggested a TacoCat slime since we used to play Genshin Impact and the game has a lot of slimes. I thought it was a cute idea and would be perfect for a badge!

I wasn't too sure how I would draw a slime, but I found a cat slime from another game which looked perfect!

I traced the slime and made it rounder to maximise the space, put a light outline around it and gave it the shine so it looked like it was made of jelly. I thought it looked pretty cute!

All that was left to do was the taco fillings which I just drew again.

I loved the face of it and I could see this slime just happily bouncing along leaving a trail of crumbs and taco fillings. 😆

I had unlocked a few sub badge slots and the first few were quite close together so I only had a month to come up with more ideas!

In the meantime I also made a blue version of the slime which didn't look as good to me.

I wanted a consistent theme across the sub badges and I've seen that what some streamers/artists do is they have a base and build up on that or have different variations of the base. Some of them simply do a recolour which I think is kinda lame tbh and not special enough.

Source: fiverr

I had a few ideas of how I could vary my TacoCat avatar but since we already did a slime one, I thought making it gaming-themed would be appropriate. More specifically, I wanted to have my badges be different classes/jobs you'd see in classic RPGs. That way they'd be completely unique and I wouldn't have to worry about building them up or them looking too similar.

So these are some common RPG classes most gamers would know:

Source: Adobe Stock

The slime didn't really fit into that but it was cute and I thought it was better to have something more recognisable for the first badge. For the second, I wanted a TacoCat archer and I found a reference from this game called BattleCats which has a bunch of cute and weird looking cats including an archer one!

This was my sketch:

And after some adjustments on the bow position so it would be obvious enough in the chat but also not block the face, I settled on this outline:

And after colouring and drawing the fillings, we get this!

I thought it looked okay at the time but looking back on it now I want to redo it. I'm not sure how I would go about doing that other than making the bow much bigger, because I do want to keep the hat. But I might draw it with a bigger feather instead.

Maybe when I have the time to redo these I'll remake these older ones again. In the meantime though, these will have to do for now.

Here's the timelapse for these two badges: