Art Attack #182: When a Happy Raccoon Judges You
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!
One thing I like to do as an artist is to draw special personalised artworks for friends as gifts! Both because I'm a bad gift giver but also because I find personalised art a better gift than anything I could buy especially in this day and age and since most of my friends are international it just makes more sense to send gifts virtually nowadays. Here's the first one I did for one of my mods that I think is one of the better ones to this day:
Anyway, this next piece was actually for one of the bigger supporters of my community who goes by Rakun on Twitch! He's contributed a lot for the community, gifting quite a lot of subs and always being around to support me. I have done art for him before, like this one I gave him for Christmas:
Since I missed his birthday in 2022 I thought I'd draw him something special for his birthday in Aug 2023! The idea for this actually came from an in-game reward I got from Prime Gaming, specifically for Valorant. We play that game quite a lot together on stream and when I received this spray I thought it was perfect since that's Rakun's favourite gun (aka a Judge) and the sloth looks almost like a raccoon! The happy face he has using the judge was just perfect so I felt like it was a crime that Rakun didn't have the spray.
So I decided to try and make it for him but with his raccoon instead of a sloth obviously. I also wanted his gun to have a special skin and asked him for his favourite Judge skin from the game. There weren't that many good options though imo, and the one he chose wasn't really a good fit so I decided to custom make a skin for him too.
These were the references I used. I also searched for some raccoon references as I wasn't sure what expression I wanted to give him.
This was the sketch I came up with, and I wanted to give him a smug/smirk expression similar to one of the references at first. But figured the happy face would look better.
Initially I was going to essentially make an animated GIF of the same spray but with his raccoon holding a custom shotgun. I'm rusty with animations so I had to sketch out the layers for this one first, identifying the moving parts and making sure I knew how to position all the components.
It was then that I realised I should just make it into an animated emote instead, so he could possibly use it since he streams on occasion as well. But unfortunately since emotes are only 500x500px and will end up being very small (about 26px) in the chat, I had to tweak it such that I maximised the space as much as possible. That meant redrawing the layers, and cutting out his body which was better since I thought it looked awkward anyway.
This was the sketch I ended up with, and I added confetti for when he shoots the gun, which is pretty perfect since this was a birthday gift after all.
It looked pretty good so I went to outlining and colouring! I stayed true to the snow raccoon I drew in the Christmas art piece to since it looked cute and Rakun liked it too.
For the gun, I went off of Omen (who is Rakun's main character of choice). He's a shadowy dude with some blinding skill and smokes but unfortunately he doesn't have a special skin in the game unlike some other characters so I had to make my own. I made it a little simple and was inspired by the animation when he uses his skill.
Source: playerassist
Eventually I came up with this which I thought looked pretty good. The barrel of the shotgun was a little meh but I wasn't really sure how else to colour it.
The other frames look more or less the same, but of course I added in the confetti and some text for the one where he shoots the gun. I didn't change the smile but I thought the fire eyes were pretty perfect here.
In full, the animation looks like this! It's pretty simple but I thought it looked good, and while it may not be as smooth as it probably could be, I'm not the best animator and as it was going to be a small emote I figured simple was best.
On top of that, I still had other art pieces to work on at the time and I'd already spent quite a bit of time trying to get this done just right. I was satisfied with this and I was so happy when Rakun said he loved it and started using it immediately in my chat!
Here's the timelapse:
https://youtube.com/shorts/ivcRXR3N_fg
If you're interested, I also draw on stream sometimes and you can even claim free artwork if you get enough channel points! We also play lots of interactive games and Valorant quite a lot 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!
