Art Attack #201: Not a Crying 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!

I would want to do something special for #200 but honestly I can't think of anything at the moment so this post will be #201 for now. Anyway, I've shared about my streaming journey on Twitch in multiple posts and the art I've done both for my Twitch channel and for my viewers. A few years ago, I wrote about the emotes I did for my Twitch channel and now it's years later I have done so many more and have even redrawn some older ones so I guess it's time for a huge new update!

So I written about most of these emotes already, except one; the crying one! I left this to the last not because I think it's the best of the bunch, on the contrary I think it's quite mid compared to the rest here. But because it's one of the few emotes I changed into a full-fledged animated emote!
But we'll get to that. First, I'll describe how we got this initial static one.

I know I wanted a crying or sad emote for those times when something sad happens on stream, especially in the games I've played. I've cried a bunch of times on stream because of sad scenes so I thought it'd be prudent. I wanted my TacoCat avatar to look more anime-like and exaggerated when crying so it'll be obvious and came up with this sketch from some references.

From there, I drew the outline on the facial features because I wanted the tears to be just blue like the reference pictures.

In the end, we get this which looks alright to be fair. But I wasn't entirely happy with it at the time. The tears looked too static and not like they were flowing, maybe because they're too steep? I also wanted it to be more anime-looking and it just wasn't right.

But at the time, I didn't really know what I could do to change it so I left it at that for the longest time. Until 3 years later, Twitch was generous enough to give their Affiliates some animated emotes (which were only for Partners previously) so it opened a whole new world for us.

It also meant that it was time for me to learn how to draw animations, at least simple ones. It was my first foray into drawing different frames so I took it slow and found some references and tutorials to help of course. These were the references I used, and I wanted a sort of mixture between the two with my TacoCat.

I started by doing a simple sketch and animating it on Procreate. Luckily it's actually pretty easy with the Animation Assist. It took a while to get the right number of frames and the right position but after a while I got this:

I thought it looked pretty good, and definitely had more of the emotion and movement that I wanted in the first place. The next step was working on the outline and colours. It took quite a bit of time adjusting and reworking it but I finally got this:

I was too focused on the movement of the taco and the tears to realise I screwed up by not including the taco filling in the movement as well like my sketch. So I had to make some changes, but eventually this was the final animation:

I thought it looked perfect, and very sad indeed. This was one of the first GIFs I made from scratch and I was pretty proud of it. I'm glad it turned out so well and that my chat liked it too!

Here's a timelapse from the start to the end for both versions of the crying emote! It might look simple but from here you can see how much work it actually took. This made me appreciate animators so much more, especially those who draw frame by frame like I did.

With that, I think we'll take a break from emotes for a while. I'll see what I can scrape up for next week's special #200 post but we'll see. Hope you enjoyed this series and look forward to more art!

I do draw on stream most Tuesdays and you can even redeem free art from me with enough channel points so come chill and hangout with us sometime over on my Twitch channelmy Twitch channel!

Thanks so much for reading!