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!
Check out my previous post in this series!
Art Attack #223: Anime Cat with Flowo 🌼
