FreeDay | Cindy & Jay

Whats up guys,

Its been a while since my last post, but I've been extraordinarily busy with a surprising increase in commissions these last few months. I've done so much between a logo for  honey-infused water, Beelieve, album covers for DinoJr., and my marathon run of podcast thumbnails for the Musicks. Expanding the breadth of my services comes a commission that desired branding for a growing Twitch channel.

Banner

At first, the client only required a banner that featured the channel name, subtitle, and watermelons(seen above). It wasn't a fussy project so I looked into ways that could describe the goofy but mature personalities of my clients. I started by sketching a pattern that could be stamped seamlessly. This naturally became the background element of the banner. And since Cindy and Jay have a warm, home-bodied nature, I felt it was appropriate to reinforce that idea by mimicking the texture of wallpaper with a soft overlay of noise and box blurring.

Icon

Next was the icon design. We knew we wanted caricatures of the two, so I collected their photos and went to work sketching. There weren't many iterations of face shape and technique, but I did play with different hairstyles for Cindy's caricature. Developing the sketches would later help me design various expressions for their emotes seen below. As for the application of color, I used a brush within the Krita suite that recreated the effect of pastel chalk. Again, I wanted to involve those previous ideas of a friendly and inviting nature at all levels of the design process, "painting" included.

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Expressions

Finally, subscribers to the channel are awarded emotes to be used during live streams across the Twitch platform. Using the above icon as  a base, I designed various expressions based off of the most common emotions. Since there was an upload limit of just 8 emotes, I provided some extra options just in case an image failed to communicate or otherwise be appealing to my clients.

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Final Emote Selection

Taking care to maintain consistency between the channel icon and the provided emotes, I elected to simply copy and paste the base painting, altering color and shape accordingly. What do you guys think? Which emote is the strongest? Weakest? What troubles do you have when drawing expressions? I occasionally have trouble staying on model, but I think I've improved since college. Leave your thoughts in the comments below. As always, don't forget to like and share this post!

Until next time,
Peace

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