Art Attack #199: TacoCat Confused about Sax? 🎷

Hey Steemit!

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'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 who redeem free artwork from me with their channel points. 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!

The next two I want to share is the confused TacoCat! There's not much of a backstory behind this one, but since I play a lot of games on stream for the first time I spend quite a bit figuring out what to do, and also figuring out what chat is telling me. The people who come to my stream are a lot younger than I am so I always feel like such a boomer trying to understand Gen Z slang too, so much so that I always say "what do you mean" or wdym.

A lot of other streamers have a confused or WDYM emote too, so I figured I'd make my own! Here are some references I found:

There were some directions I thought of like scratching the head or chin, or just having the arms be shrugging like 🤷 but I mostly wanted a confused anime-like face.

I think I was stumped on how to make my TacoCat arms/paws look like it's shrugging so I just settled for an arms up kind of pose, and ended up with this sketch:

From there I altered my png and drew in the face and arms.

Initially I wanted to add in the letters WDYM but it was my first time making an emote with actual letters on it so I was really unsure of how to go about it. I tried different fonts and colours but it didn't look right to me, so I scrapped the idea.

In the end I just settled for some question marks and I thought they looked a lot simpler but better. It's a pretty simple emote but I thought it was fine at the time.

Now looking at it, I think I could definitely do a lot better, although I'm not sure I would. This emote is not in rotation anymore, and hardly anyone uses it but if I were to change something I would definitely try to make the arms be shrugging and have more of a stunned face, with it more zoomed in on the facial expression too. But then again, this was from 3 years ago so I think it was fine for the time.

The other one I want to share is this one that I made at the behest of one of the biggest contributors to my community! He goes by xxAimanrifqi on Twitch and he used to play a particular sound alert on my channel every Friday by giving bits, and he called it Epic Sax Friday since the sound was the Epic Sax Guy meme:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Xp-VM8Z9wIQ

He's given a lot to my channel so I told him he could request an emote and I would make it. He chose to honour his ritual by having me make an Epic Sax emote!

The only idea I could think that would fit would be my TacoCat playing a saxophone and he wanted the letters ESF in it too, to stand for Epic Sax Friday. Here's my rough sketch of it:

It seemed pretty simple because all I had to do was draw a saxophone with the paws around it.

In the end, we get this which I thought looked alright.

Now that we have animated emotes on my Twitch channel, this could make a really good animated emote. But it's too bad that ESF is no more, since Aiman hasn't been by my streams in a long time. I appreciated his support and the times we spent together, but I know that my viewers would eventually get bored of me, or would quit Twitch and focus on their own stuff. It's sad but understandable, which is why I'm thankful for every single minute we have together, and why I always welcome them back whenever I see them in chat.

Here's the timelapse for these two emotes:

https://youtube.com/shorts/-9lmObt6rjg

We just have one more emote to share in this series, but it's a special one of sorts. Tune in next week to see!

Thanks for reading!

To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!

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Check out my previous post in this series!
Art Attack #198: Hype with Confetti TacoCat! 🎉