On an episode of the art podcast, I learn how artist Scott C. Hamilton creates his own chat emotes for his Twitch channel.
You create emoticons, how is this process done?
So when I first started on Twitch you don't get emotes you just get your channel but then they enable people to subscribe to your channel and give you bits which are a penny each.
so people donate a thousand bits, that's ten dollars. Which happens often. Then you get a little emote for your channel they can use if they're subscribed and they pop up in the chat.
I've got one that's like "Yo!" and I've got another one like "Yay!"
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| Scott's Twitch emotes promo |
I started drawing them for myself and then other people saw me doing it in my chat and people I played games with and said "hey can you draw me some emotes?" and kind of snowballed from there. Now I do quite a bit of it.
How does one go about turning these things into emotes? I get that you can draw an emote but how do you make them something from a drawing to it actually being in an emote selection?
What I do is I draw a square image and then I resize it. You have to have three different sizes for emotes. Then there's a place in twitch under your dashboard that says "affiliates" and you've got your emotes. You can just upload your emotes.
So I draw them and then I size them appropriately so that all they have to do is select them and put them in.
Do you assign names to them? So when they're searching it's like here's the "Yo!" one you made.
Yeah. What it does is it takes the first six letters of your twitch name and then you put whatever you want on the end. So it's like hmilt-yo or hmilt-hug.
But if they're subscribed to your channel they can just click on the little emote thing in the bottom right and select it. I never do that I type all my emotes by hand while I'm chatting because another thing I learned from high school that I still do, I'm a touch typist. I never look at my keyboard.
Have you ever made emoticons or any for stuff outside of Twitch?
I don't know about using them outside of Twitch. I'm sure I could create emotes I mean it's you know it's probably not that technologically difficult right? I'm gonna google that after this and I'll tell you.