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!
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! I thought since I'm an artist this would be a good way to reward my loyal viewers, and also practise my art or different styles at the same time.
This request was made by one of my fellow streamer friends, who goes by Phangtasy on Twitch! He hangs around on streams sometimes and likes to whale a bunch, contributing to the community so it was only a matter of time before he finally redeemed a free artwork from me.
For this he wanted an emote of a piggy crying, since he likes pigs and uses them as his emotes, which were done by another artist who drew this series of adorable piggy emotes! I loved them and thought they were so cute so I wanted to make sure mine resembled them in a way and weren't too different. These were the references I used:
I think I did a rough tracing of sorts to get an idea of what it would look like as an emote to have the piggy crying, since I wanted the "hands" to be at his eyes like the picture in the top right. Initially it looked pretty cute:
But on doing a cleaner sketch it ended up looking a little different than I thought. Maybe it's that I changed the hands to the actual pig's foot that made it look weird, of that I added in the mouth but it just didn't look as cute anymore.
But I felt like adding the mouth made it look more obvious that he's crying. I also added in the top part of the body since the other emotes had that as well instead of just the head which might've made it look different too. Maybe it would've looked better with just the head, hmm.
Either way, Phang was fine with it so I went with this one and did a rough animation since he initially wanted me to draw an animated emote which I haven't done for someone else before. I've done my own animated emotes but they were really simple and only 2 frames but he said simple was fine, so I did a rough sketch and got this:
Phang said it was good, and wanted me to add in a crescent moon on the forehead of the piggy. He likes crescent moons as well and it is in one of his current emotes but it surprised me a little. I was fine with it of course and I found a very cute vector I could reference so I just added in a small-ish one, and after colouring the piggy using the same colours as his other emotes, we got this which I thought looked pretty good!
I thought it would look better with colour and it did, but at the same time it still didn't have the cute look that I was going for.
I tried to give the tear streaks more of a gradient so they would look less one-dimensional and I think it looked okay. I wanted something like those very exaggerated crying faces you'd see in anime but of course since this was only 2 frames it wouldn't be as smooth. Once I did the same for both frames of the emote, the animated one looked like this:
I'm just glad Phang loved it so much he uploaded it immediately! Now another there's another streamer who has an emote drawn by me, and all his subscribers will be able to use it! It's truly an honour to be able to do that for another streamer.
Here's the 30 second timelapse:
https://youtube.com/shorts/KNdZZJSBAzI
And just for curiosity's sake I actually did a draw and colour another rough one based on the cuter sketch I did and I actually like it a lot better tbh. I'm not sure if it will look better as an emote though but I thought it looked really cute and cleaner too since it's just the head. Maybe I'll ask Phangtasy if he wants me to redo it sometime in this style?
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
