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!
It'd been a while but this was another free artwork redemption over on my Twitch channel, where viewers can use their channel points they've hoarded over the course of watching my streams to claim free art from me!
This request was made by one of my (used-to-be) regulars, Nekosohaiz aka Neko, who wanted yet another emote for his own channel! He had previously redeemed a free artwork from me and had requested I draw him a cat holding a heart emote that I think turned out really well:
This time, he wanted something a little more challenging, since his request was his cat holding a gun and going pew pew! To be more specific, he wanted the cat to be holding a Reaver Vandal from Valorant, and it being my first time drawing a gun I was kinda hesitant.
These were the references I used:
He wanted the white Reaver Vandal too, which had some annoying details and I was initially stumped on how I could fir the whole rifle in the limited emote space since its 500x500px. But I tried my best to fill the space as much as I could while making both the cat and gun visible and we get something like this:
He didn't have any directions for the facial expression so I just copied the other cat I found but later Neko said an angry face would be more apt so I changed it and I think this definitely fit a lot better.
The sketch was actually the relatively easy part, because I mostly just traced the vandal since I wanted it to look as accurate as possible. The only thing was distorting it so it would fit.
For the outline I only wanted the cat to have a bold black outline like I usually do, since I wanted the vandal to be "natural" in a sense.
I used a different brush for the eyes and mouth to give it more of an anime-like appearance and I think it worked really well.
For the colour, this step definitely took the longest since the vandal has so many little details, shadows and highlights and I wanted to include as much as possible so it would be as accurate as possible and recognisable.
It was definitely a huge pain, but once I got here I think it looked pretty good! It was a little rough in some parts but I figured it'd be hard to notice since the emote will be quite small.
I also had to colour the paws on another layer separate from the main body which was definitely the easiest to colour. I just used the same colours I used previously and added more shadows from the gun. I also drew in some flames in the eyes to match the facial expression.
And to complete the piece, I gave Neko some options on fonts since I wanted to write the words PEW PEW to fill the rest of the space. And eventually we get this:
I thought it looked pretty perfect, except I was a little iffy on including the crosshair but Neko said he wanted it to there we go. The vandal was definitely the biggest challenge for this one but I think it turned out really well and I was pretty proud of it. I'm so glad Neko loved it too!
Here's the 30 second timelapse:
https://youtube.com/shorts/oluULFkm2PY
If you're interested, I do draw on stream sometimes and you can even claim free artwork if you get enough channel points! We also play lots of interactive games so come hang out with us on my Twitch channel!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
