Overview

Emoticons are quite an important aspect of communication in this day of age of the internet with such complex interactions happening between users in mere seconds using Emoticons is a must! This TIP is here to teach you how to create awesome looking Emoticons for all occasions. We will review what platform you think will be best, choosing the right emoticons for the job, the principles that make a readable great looking emoticon, the process, and adding a little bit of polish to make those emotions really stick out! So let’s get started!

The Platform Chooses The Size

Emoticons are used all over the internet and therefore with many devices such as tablets, computers, phones, etc. Choosing the right platform for your emoticons will be very important and that is why it is one of the first sections we must discuss, without this you may end up causing unknown frustrations with aspect ratios and readability when creating the emoticons, to avoid this I’ve put this section to help you easily choose the best platforms with a size guide.

 

Twitch is the most popular streaming site in the world and therefore their chats are filled with lively emotes, this makes for the perfect place for your brand new Emoticons! Twitches aspect ratios follow a strict sizing guide of 112px X 112px, 56px X 56 px and 28px X 28px. Please see below for an example of sizing

 

The next site that would be popular is LINE Sticker size for emoticons in text messages, their aspect ratios for stickers max are 320px X 270px Please see below for an example of sizing.

The last choice was MIXER for Emotes, like twitch they follow a strict size although it is only one which is 24px X 24px Please see below for an example of sizing.

As you can see the platform makes the Emoticon per se, and by that I mean you should research where you are planning your emoticons to be seen, this planning, in the long run, will help cause you less headache down the road, these are only three examples of popular websites but I hope you find them helpful.

 

Process of Choosing The Right Emoticons

Choosing the right emotions for your emoticons is the next process for you, maybe you saw a meme that you found really funny, a goofy picture sent from a friend or maybe just working from scratch! Those are all great places to start, for those who are working from scratch it may be a little harder to decide what you’d think is the best, lucky for you I’ve put an info graph with a slew of emotions for you to work from! For our purposes let’s choose some! I think I’m going for Angry, Optimistic and Overwhelmed!

You’re Over Exaggerating!

Now that we have selected the emotions it’s important to talk about a few tips and principles that will help your emoticons stick out and be more readable when shrunk!

 

One will be taking your emotions to an extreme! The emotion needs to be read in small sizes which means overexaggerated features such as large eyes, mouths, and gestures, anything that will attract the attention of the person and be able to look at it and recognize it at a glance, these are important things as emoticons are seen in short periods of time in a small pixel format. Hitting the mark with these features will help you reach that readability goal! See below, for example, take it to the extreme!

 

The Process (Of Your Emotions Heh!)

Now that we’ve made it this far, incomes the lengthy process of actually creating the emoticons! Remember all the things we just talked about with size, picking, and readability, this is where we implement all of it! Let’s dive on in!

 

First off let’s start with opening Clip Studio and choosing our aspect ratio for the project, remember before when we chose our platform? This is where that comes in, I’ve decided I’m going to make some twitch emoticons this time around! So following the template their largest emote size is 112px X 112px, therefore, I’m going to work in a size bigger than that, let’s say 5x more making it 560px X 560px which is both comfortable for me to work in and also very easy for me to downsize when it comes time to export to the correct aspect ratio.

 

Now I’m going to make a new layer and sketch out my initial emoticons

Remember it is important that you work edge to edge with your emoticons to utilize all the space, it may look easy to read now but during this sketch phase going in with that mindset will help later on!

Now with a little elbow grease, you should have the number of Emoticons of your choice mine ended up being the three I chose before!

Now we can move on to the next phase which is lineart!

 

Make a new layer and lower the opacity of the sketch layer to your liking Mine will be 25% opacity

QUICK TIP #1: You don't have to use black lineart! I like warm colors so I actually chose a dark brown, although it is a subtle change it's actually quite appealing to the eye! This may be a game-changer depending on what your making, play with the color slider and see what you come up with!

BAM! Line art done! Notice how I kept to those edges to maximize my drawing space, He's looking happy! On to color!

Make a new layer under your line art. Select the outside of your Emoticon that you don't plan on coloring, on your bar press the "Invert selected area" Button, this ensures that your emote is covered head to... uh, I guess it's just a head, so head to head! Fill with bucket tool afterwards.

Your emote should look something like this so far!

QUICK TIP #2: You don't have to paint on the same color layer, you can actually create a new layer and clip it to the color layer! This allows you to change things up if you're not liking the way one color layer looks you can just delete it with no repercussion! Just click the Clip to Layer Below on the layers tab and boom you're a clip studio wizard!

Back to shading! Now I like to create a gradient spray effect on my emotes so I start with a soft brush and shade a shadow and a light source on both sides afterword I use a hard brush and add a hard light and a hard shadow, I use the standard soft brush in the Clip Studio Brushes.

Rinse and repeat for the rest of parts of your emoticon and you're looking pretty snazzy like this guy!

Now that we are done with this Emoticon we could probably say we are set! You'd be right but there's one thing we can do to help our emotes stick out more and that is Texture! Which brings me to...

 

QUICK TIP #3: Texture can help provide even more emphasis or character to your Emotes and I believe Clip Studio is a great program to emphasis that, It's myriad of screen tones, textures, and an assortment of patterns makes it the perfect place to really work this TIP

 

Remember that selection and invert trick before? We will do the exact same thing, afterward though we will select in our bar the "New Tone" button

From here you can select any patterns you like from clip studio and edit them to your liking! I'm going to choose a simple circle pattern at 27.5 Frequency and 50 percent density!

Afterward we are going to modify the tone layer in the layer properties tab, create a new layer above the tone layer, and we are going to press the "Combine to Layer below" Button this ensures we have turned the tone layer into a standard layer which we can now manipulate with color!

Now Select the "Blending Modes" Tab in the layer properties and play with the modes and opacity that you think would be best for your emoticon! mine ended up being overlay, with an opacity of 25%

Look at him now, what a star! Now rinse and repeat for the other emoticons and you should be sitting real pretty! These are how mine turned out!

Congratulations! You just made your first awesome looking Emoticons! now all is to export them...!

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Uh, why are you still reading this? Scroll down to learn how to export!

Export

Good to see you again! Now, let's start exporting! This is where your hard work on aspect ratios and platform research pays off! Go up to the File tab and select Export (Single Layer) - .png(PNG) the reason why we choose PNG is it included a transparent layer which is important in getting rid of the white background from the emote.

The export setting will then open up here is where you can select your sizing for the platform you chose, since I worked at 560px X 560px I can now downsize with ease to the twitch emote sizes I was aiming for which I will choose as 112px X 112px

QUICK TIP #4 Remember when exporting your Emoticon out you MUST turn off the Paper or layer background behind the image or you'll still end up with a white background behind your emoticon because it's treated as a part of the image so just remember to check that off when you're done!

Finished!

Thanks for reading my tutorial! If you found this handy feel free to give a like or comment on what you'd like to see next or general question on the topic!

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