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 started a new series sharing some of the custom subscriber badges I made back in 2021 for my Twitch channel! After a month of streaming I was fortunate enough to become a Twitch affiliate which comes with a lot of perks like getting money through viewer subscriptions, ad revenue and the like. Subscribers get benefits such as an ad-free viewing experience but also access to unique channel emotes and a special subscriber badge next to their name in chat!
Since you get to customise the subscriber badges I thought this was a perfect chance to get creative! 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! I wanted a consistent theme across the sub badges and I thought making it gaming-related would be appropriate. More specifically, I wanted my badges to be different classes/jobs you'd see in classic RPGs. That way they'd be completely unique unlike some other streamers/artists whom just do a recolour or slight variation of the base, or build up upon it like these:
Source: fiverr
So these were the first few that I made and we've covered the first two so far, which leaves the Pirate for the 9 month badge and the Ninja for the 1 year badge!
For the Pirate I wanted there to be a few key elements that would make it recognisable: the pirate hat and eyepatch. But it didn't seem like enough details to me so I did some research and found some references that I thought would be helpful.
I remembered there was a derpy parrot in the channel reward icon pack that Twitch gave for free, and I thought it'd be cool to include it since parrots are a pirate's pet.
I also thought the treasure chest cat was really cute, so I came with a rough sketch of how my TacoCat would look like with a treasure chest, hat and eyepatch.
Initially I thought of him biting the chest like a toy would be cute but after I drew and coloured in the hat and parrot something looked off.
I wasn't really sure about the treasure chest so I drew and coloured in the eyepatch first.
It still looked like something was missing so I tried to draw in a simple treasure chest, with a paw covering it, and we get this!
It turned out surprisingly well actually! I liked the colours and the hat and eyepatch looked pretty good as well. Now looking back I see a few mistakes here and there but if I were to change anything I'd probably change the paw placement a little, and make the eyepatch bigger.
The next one was a special one for 1 year subscribers which was the Ninja! I thought a Ninja TacoCat would look pretty cool and probably pretty simple since most of it was going to be black.
There were a few different references I found but I'd say a classic ninja look was a full hood with just the eyes showing. So this was the sketch I came up with:
Initially I didn't really have an idea on the pose until someone in my chat suggested I draw my cat holding a katana or a shuriken. Since I already had a katana on the back I thought a shuriken would be cool to add and wouldn't take up too much space or block the face. I drew in the hood with some shadows and highlights. I didn't want to make it all black since it would be hard to distinguish with the black shuriken so I made it a little on the greyer side.
And after drawing and colouring in a simple shuriken and katana, we get this!
I thought this looked pretty cool but the katana looks quite off to me now. The lines are too thin but the colour is good. If I were to change this now I would definitely redraw it again so it at least matched the style of the shuriken. But it still looks pretty good nonetheless.
Here's the timelapse for these two badges:
After these were done I took a break for a while but since then I've worked on more so I'll share them as well! Hope you're enjoying this series and thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 65/75) Liquid rewards.
thanks for curating!