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!
Nowadays with work and streaming most of my art is dedicated to my channel and viewers. 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.
This particular piece is a pair of emotes I did back in July 2023 on a whim. It's actually inspired by a throwaway joke we made on stream while I was playing Valorant, an first person shooter game by Riot Games.
Source: Dexerto
If you haven't been on Twitch, there is an emote that is pretty popular called KEKW which was birthed into Twitch chat due to a famous Spanish video of a man laughing and it was combined with World of Warcraft slang. Here's the video in question:
But basically KEKW looks like this and it's supposed to mean something like LOL or to represent laughter.
Anyway, while I was playing Valorant one of my teammates wrote GEK as a short form of Gekko, the character which gave me the silly idea of combining the emotes together and making a Gekko version of KEKW called GEKW.
Source: exitlag
We started laughing about it on stream and since we always do dumb things on stream, I felt like I had no choice but to draw it. So that's exactly what I did the next art stream!
Here are the references I used:
And this was the sketch:
I was struggling to find a good balance between the cartoony look that I liked and also trying to draw it similar to the actual KEKW emote so it would be recognisable. It was quite difficult to strike that balance tbh but I tried my best.
Here's the outline:
Then it was time to colour! I wanted some brighter colours since it was going to be an emote and very small in the chat (56px). I colour referenced this fanart I found which had some lighter shades.
And finally after adding some shadows and highlights to give it some depth, we get this:
It looks quite cursed but tbh I have no idea how else I could've drawn this, especially given how the KEKW emote is just a cut of an actual guy's face.
Anyway, going off this, there are different variations to KEKW like this one that's called KEKL, and is used to represent grief or loss. KEKL indicates that someone has suffered some sort of defeat that the writer finds humorous.
Chat convinced me to do a KEKL version using Gekko's face yet again called GEKL and since we already did GEKW I thought why not. It couldn't get much worse, right?
I might've spoke too soon.
I thought I'd flip the head this time so it would complement the other one. After tracing the face this was the sketch:
Then it was time to outline and colour, until finally we get this:
I can't decide which one looks more cursed but chat seemed to like it because of that so I guess it's a success? I can't really think of how to improve it even now so I guess it's fine.
Here is the timelapse for these two emotes:
https://youtube.com/shorts/NNQ8HZ52LCo
The things I will do for weird jokes, but hey it's not harming anyone and it makes people laugh so it's all good?
If you want to come join the chaos, make sure to follow me on Twitch or check out my Youtube channel!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
