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!
We're currently on the series of commissions I did for one of my streamer friends who goes by Phangtasy on Twitch! I haven't done an actual commission in a long long time, but it is available upon request if any of my viewers or streamer friends would like me to do some art for them. Since Phangtasy does contribute quite a bit to our community so I was more than happy to help out!
I'd previously done some emotes for him which I'm glad he really liked, and his avatar is a pig which is quite easy to draw.
This is one of the older emotes I did for him (link to the post here):
Anyway, he ordered 5 emotes and thankfully had some ideas for them. I shared two so far, and the third one was one that was a little rough in the beginning called a bleh emote basically with a tongue sticking out in an angry way. Something like this:
I did find a few other references but I could see this being a little tough/weird because of the hand that I would have to draw.
I wasn't sure which style to go with so I did two sketches and let Phang choose which one he liked better.
Here's the first one, which I admit looks quite off but I was trying to go for a more playful version of :P
And here's the second one following his reference.
Phang also thought the first one looked quite weird so we just went with the second one and I did the outline.
I thought it looked okay at the time but in hindsight I should've sent him the outline first since there were some mistakes mainly in the consistency of the line thickness with the nose and mouth.
But I went to work on the colour first since that's what I did for the previous emotes and he seemed fine with it.
I did have to do some corrections on the lines after sending it to him though, but it wasn't too bad. After that I added the shading and highlights and in the end, we get something like this:
Some of the shadows look very obvious but the emotes will be a lot smaller since they're only used in Twitch/discord chat which is around 56px or less. So I have to make the expressions and colours bolder and more exaggerated.
Also, the moon is missing in the final version and there's a story behind it. It's quite personal but basically it was related to Phang's partner whom he's not together with anymore, so he requested that I removed the moon from all the emotes. But I did initially draw them emotes with that crescent moon since that was his request at the time.
Here's the timelapse for this emote:
I thought this one was alright and pretty average compared to the previous ones I did, but it was still good I guess. I didn't know how else I would change it anyway, at least without it looking very cursed. Phangtasy was happy with it though and that's all that matters.
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
