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. 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 piece was from a special stream event I did last year called a subathon! If you're unfamiliar, a subathon is a type of livestream where every time a streamer receives a subscription, more time is added to a descending timer with various rewards after a certain number of subs.
Every September, Twitch has a site-wide promotion on subscriptions for the whole month, and since my birthday is in September I thought it'd be perfect for a charity subathon! I'm normally not comfortable with pressuring my viewers for subs but since it's for a good cause I thought why not? I do always emphasise that donations and voluntary but I have various incentives available for those who do contribute.
So last year I decided on a charity organisation that helps rescue animals from disaster-ridden countries like Ukraine. Since my username is TacoCat it only made sense. I wanted to do an art piece to acknowledge everyone who contributed to the cause just like last year and I thought of Neko Atsume!
Source: martlet
Neko Atsume is this mobile kitty collector game where you can put out furniture and toys to attract cute cats and take pictures of them! It's super adorable and I love the chibi look of the cats as well.
I was going to do cat and dog stickers for those who gave 5 subs or more, so I thought I'd model the background after one of the environments in the game. My community voted to have a cafe style background which I thought was cute.
This was the one from the game, and I wanted something mostly similar except maybe just recolouring it and adding in some touches to make it a TacoCat cafe instead.
I traced the general structure of the cafe first. I wanted to include some cat features like maybe some tunnels or platforms for the cats to rest but I also wanted as much space as possible to put the stickers.
For the colour I wanted something darker on the background since the game's one is quite neutral and soft-looking. I wanted the stickers to stand out eventually but I wanted the background to look good on its own as well.
Then I coloured in the extra touches like the glasses, a cat mug, the windows, and I also replaced the painting with my TacoCat avatar.
I drew in what I imagine a TacoCat Cafe logo would be like for the playmat, and also changed the windows to show a nice sunset in the outside. I was a little iffy on the lines of the mat but actually now that I look at them again I think I should've just stuck with the horizontal lines only because the perspective is off.
I was short on time so I just went with this for the background and I think it looked okay.
I had some sticker templates ready for the donors to choose from so I'd basically just trace it and recolour it however they like during the stream.
The first one I did was this brown Shar Pei with a dog food bag that said Scooby Snax.
There were some cat ones as well. I wanted to recolour them but most of the donors didn't really know what other colours to use so I just went with the original. It is still a high-definition version since I drew them.
There were some cat toy stickers I did as well.
And a special custom colour cat sticker which I thought was quite cute.
So I compiled all the stickers I did and arranged them together with all the donors names with the cat cafe background, and after 35 hours of stream time we get this!
It was such a crazy stream and definitely the longest one I've done to date. But I'm so glad everyone was so supportive of it and we managed to get quite a sum to donate too! I think the art turned out really nice as well!
Here's a link to the timelapse on my instagram if you're interested.
Overall it was a real crazy ride but I'm glad people had fun and all for a good cause! I'll have to plan something for this year soon and I know my community is looking forward to it as well.
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
