Art Attack #189: Magical Girl TacoCat? 🌟
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!
So last week I started a new series sharing some of the custom subscriber badges I made back in 2021 for my Twitch channel! After just a month of streaming I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to become a Twitch affiliate which comes with a lot of perks like getting money through viewer subscriptions, ad revenue and the like. Subscribers get benefits such as an ad-free viewing experience but also access to unique emotes from the channel and a special subscriber badge next to their name in chat!
I had unlocked a few sub badge slots and the first few were quite close together so I only had a month to come up with more ideas! I wanted a consistent theme across the sub badges and I thought making it gaming-themed would be appropriate. More specifically, I wanted to have my badges be different classes/jobs you'd see in classic RPGs. That way they'd be completely unique unlike some other streamers/artists whom just do a recolour of the base.
So we covered the first two badges last time, the slime and the archer. My next idea was a mage since that's one of my personal favourite RPG classes.
Thankfully Battlecats has quite a few different cats with various weapons and classes too so I used their characters for references.
For the mage I thought of drawing my TacoCat avatar with a wand and a magician hat, and since the Battlecats mage has some hair I thought a wig would be nice too. So here's my sketch:
I decided to make the hair primarily purple-ish since it's the complement of yellow and would make it stand out against my taco.
the broom was a little tricky since I made it too sharp in my sketch, but after consulting some vectors I realise I should just draw in the bristles with finer lines and make the bottom more wavy. So in the end we get this!
I did this back in mid-2021 and looking back at it now I think the only thing I would change is the hair. I mistakenly drew it on the inside of the taco which looks a little weird when it should be around the taco like a wig. Other than that I think this looks pretty good still!
The next badge idea I had was of course a warrior one since that's a basic RPG class that every gamer knows. This one needed a bit more consideration since there's so many designs we could do for a warrior. I knew I wanted a helmet and a sword but the question became what kind of helmet. These were my references:
Eventually I settled on a traditional knight helmet with the bristles on top. I guess it's sort of similar to roman knight helmets with the mohawk but a little simpler. This was my sketch:
I had a little trouble the paws on the outline but I think it turned out okay.
I wanted different colours for the sword and the helmet and thankfully found some references that I could colour source. I added some highlights and shadows to them as well.
I changed the eyes a little bit recently since they were a little too small and thick the first time. So now it looks like this, which I thought looks a lot better.
Here's the timelapse for these two badges:
https://youtube.com/shorts/_AasihMM4gs
Hope you're enjoying this series. Thanks so much for reading and tune in next week for more!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
