ZLG - Emotes

ZLG's MaloDance Emote

2026-08-03T00:00:00-07:00

My community unlocked this emote during Subathon 2026! I leaned on the skills I learned from the last year or so of pixel art practice and commissions to take on two birds with one stone.

Bird One: Community Satisfaction

It's quite simple, really. Despite my Twitch stream having a good number of emotes, they're just kinda silly and general in their usage. I needed some that were purpose-built. This emote's job is explicitly dancing and vibing. It can be used for hype moments or good music during stream.

The Malo Mart dance from Zelda: Twilight Princess is a classic goofball routine that is just the right kind of weird. It was the right choice, everyone was in favor.

Bird Two: Testing my Skill

The second prong of this project was to really put my skills to the test. I thought to myself, "Twitch allows emotes up to 60 frames. What can I do that needs that many frames?" That thought was left to percolate while I figured out how the emote would be made.

There are many characters I could've chosen to do the dance, but I chose the most obvious from Twilight Princess: the stuck-up shopkeeper in Hyrule Castle Town. He looks down on Link for looking shabby, but is eventually forced to dance as he serves you later in the game, after Malo purchases the shop. The irony is rich. One of my favorite scenarios in the Zelda series.

What better way to pay homage to Zelda with another 2-for-1, though? The Minish Cap had a great art style for its format. Despite that game's sprites being larger than the 28×28 constraints I work with for Twitch emotes, I found a way to put the Malo Mart guy into those dimensions! The torso had to be shortened a little to do it, but I'm largely pleased with the result.

I was aiming for the Minish Cap style due to its focus on outlines with a hue to them. The pastels often used in that game were inspirational to some degree, but the Malo Mart guy's outfit used quite a number of varied hues that were hard to capture in such a small sprite. I like the style for its ability to convey shape and color together with smart selective outlining. In the end, my piece deviates from Capcom's style, but if you look closely I think you can see its influence.

Production

Building it was harder than you'd think. Making the face was fairly straight-forward, as were the hands. Getting the motion correct in the legs (very minimal in Twilight Princess, actually!) and the sway in the arms was quite trying. Once I got one side correct, I did essentially mirror it for the return trip, with some modifications to ensure it looks correct.

One of the best parts of pixel art is its re-usability. I try to build my pieces out of smaller, reusable pieces where I can, because even rebuilding them isn't so bad, if you have the pieces you built it with. ProMotionNG makes that simple by letting me turn any selection into a brush, to store in any .pmp file, or in its global brush storage. It's an essential part of my workflow now.

It's also the original purpose of pixel art: reusable game assets. So, this guy's hands and arms were copied and mirrored a little to shorten production, because the most challenging was yet to come...

The Malo Mart guy has a rotating horn on his cap. To make this look good, the horn should do a full rotation during the animation, so it loops correctly and is seamless. Doing this in 60 frames is quite a challenge!

First, I divided the task into smaller, more manageable segments. I chopped it in half, twice, which gave me 15 frames per "quadrant" of the horn's rotation. If I could produce a 15-frame animation that looks like a smooth quarter-turn, then I should be able to keep whatever pixel steps I used, establish some key frames, and make a smooth, consistent animation.

That task took quite a while! The emote sat there, unfinished, for at least a month or two. Rendering a shiny, rotating horn in pixel art isn't easy. But eventually, I gathered the gumption to grind it out, do the work, and refine every last pixel. And damn, look at it! It's one of the smoothest animations I've ever done. The rotating horn is still pleasant to watch, even after obsessing over the final version for two or three days before I released it.

It wouldn't have happened without my awesome subscribers! Thanks a lot to the REAL Game Z!

This is an emote that you can use on Twitch when you subscribe to my channel.

Shwack's Creeper Explosion

2026-06-26T00:00:00-07:00

My client approached me one day, asking "hey do you think you could do a Minecraft Creeper exploding?" At first blush, I thought "Well, it's already kind of pixel art, how hard could it be?" Well, it's a bit more complex than that, but I was essentially correct! My rendition is a little more saturated, and has less moss on it.

The big detail to get right in this piece is the smaller bits of smoke. I wanted them to look and feel close to the original game, complete with the multiple shades and going in multiple directions. The creeper itself simply expands a little while blinking before the big BOOM happens, just like it does in-game. I used multiples of the same animation to follow up the big blast, and then scatter tiny smoke pieces at the end.

We were both very happy with the result, and his community enjoyed it as well! The smoothness I think is what stands out the most with this one.

To see this emote in action, visit my client's stream!

Kay's Darth Kissing

2026-05-21T00:00:00-07:00

My client requested an emote for her stream that was Vader-themed and showing affection. I didn't have much to go on, but immediately had an idea. The reference showed Vader holding his hand out with hearts, and my first instinct was to focus on the heart, since Vader's helmet doesn't exactly scream "I'm lovey dovey".

The animation consists of Vader blowing a kiss with his hand, while a heart comes out and throbs as it floats upward. The heart's animation came out really well, and conveys the juxtaposition of Vader's imposing helmet and a silly heart. Another job completed!

This piece tested my ability to work with a monochromatic, complex shape that's shiny. It came out pretty solid, but I didn't quite capture the shininess I was hoping for.

My client's community enjoyed it when they went Affiliate and had emotes ready to go!

To see this emote in action, visit my client's stream!

ZLG's Bonfire Emote

2026-05-14T00:00:00-07:00

After knocking out an emote so quickly for HatBastion and his crew, I had Dark Souls on the mind and was looking for an opportunity to try out palette cycling in an animation. The first inspiration was the central figure of the games: the bonfire. It's on the loading screen, it's your respite against the Hollows, and it could serve as a break or rest time emote for the stream. I thought it was a great idea, so work began!

About Palette Cycling

"What is palette cycling?" one might ask. It's a technique where the pixels in an image don't change, but the assigned colors do. In older games, the graphics use what's called an indexed palette, where colors are stored in a table of numbers, and the image is represented by those color indexes instead. This reduces the space needed to store image data. When you do palette cycling, you're re-assigning the color indexes so that the image displays different colors, usually in a sequence of some kind. It's the animated form of a palette swap!

There are two ways to do this that are most obvious: the first is the repeating palette cycle. That's used in titles like Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, some of the Mega Man games, and more, usually to give the water and lava their dynamic feel, or to make energy weapon shots look otherworldly. The ramp cycles through its colors, and returns to the first color, which is usually much brighter/darker and a different hue.

The second palette cycling type is the mirrored, i.e. it ramps up, and then back down. This gives the colors a glowing, embery feel. Lots of lighting, and some weapon effects use this property, but it's usually used in places like animated tiles to reduce the number of tile updates. It was more present in older games where there was limited space to create a complicated engine or enough assets to achieve the look designers were going for.

Production

I used the mirrored palette cycling technique to build the bonfire emote. I started with a ramp from the deep red to the bright yellow and white, built the emote at its darkest, and then fiddled with the palette in ProMotionNG until it felt like it was a proper palette cycle that gave it the same glow the bonfire has on the loading screen in Dark Souls.

It's important that whatever image editing tool you have allows you to grab an entire selection of colors and re-assign their indexes live, so you can plan your art better. While I use GIMP for digital drawing, it's ill-suited for fine-tuned pixel or palette manipulation despite having extensive other image editing capabilities. ProMotionNG and GraphicsGale can do this sort of palette cycling with ease.

Something I added that other artists might not is two different cycle durations, so it isn't a uniform animation. One is slightly slower than the other, so it gives it more of a dynamic feel. I would have added a third speed to it, but I had trouble getting three variations that didn't feel same-y. I think two is a good compromise.

This is an emote that you can use on Twitch when you subscribe to my channel.

HatBastion's Sleepy Hamster

2026-05-06T00:00:00-07:00

My client approached me looking to make a fun, reusable emote to signify sleepiness. Their community is big on cute, fluffy animals, and a sleepy hamster was the perfect way to go! Before details got sorted out, I had a sketch of the idea ready.

We spent some time deciding on a good pose for him. Midway through, the ears ended up looking "like mushrooms", which I thought was an amusing way to convey what was going on, but I understood and we straightened it out quickly!

In the animation, our hamster boy sighs, a bubble expands quickly, and it (somewhat slower) deflates in time for another breath. It was satisfying to work on something easy to animate and expressive!

In the end, my client and their mod team had no critiques at all and it was a hit in the community! Another awesome piece to bring fun to the screen!

Production of this emote was broadcast live on Twitch, with my client's permission.

This asset was originally animated, and I lack an easy way to watermark it in that form. Thus, only a static thumbnail for now. To see it in action, visit my client's stream.

ZLG's MarcusBOOM Emote

2026-04-20T00:00:00-07:00

Robert... I am Leon Kennedy. BOOM

The full details of this piece are hard to remember, but it mostly boiled down to how much I and fellow Twitch peeps enjoy the roflgator memes, so I tried my hand at making him pixel style. It came out pretty decent!

This is an emote that you can use on Twitch when you subscribe to my channel.

HatBastion's Godzilla Holding a Heart

2025-10-26T00:00:00-07:00

This little guy was a lot of fun to put together! My client was looking for a cute, chubby Godzilla holding a heart for their community to use. I loved the idea, and after we pulled together some references and agreed on a few colors, I started pixel-pushing.

A few iterations were all it took to settle on lizard boi's head shape, tail arrangement, how he's holding the heart, and so on. The hardest part of this piece was figuring out the best way to dither it, to suggest the texture of his scaly skin. That's super hard at this resolution, so I opted to shade the dithering itself, once a good pattern was established. It's a rarely-used technique due to how hard it is to get forms correct, but it worked here.

The way he blinks and opens his mouth also brought a lot of personality to the emote, without a whole lot of rework! Since we ran out of vertical pixels to get a really big RAWR, I went with turning his head back a little bit, and shaded the teeth pixels in-place to give the illusion of depth in limited space.

This asset was originally animated, and I lack an easy way to watermark it in that form. Thus, only a static thumbnail for now. To see it in action, visit my client's stream.

ZLG's Nugget Emote

2025-09-24T00:00:00-07:00

This was one of the "unhinged" emotes that my community wanted, as part of a channel subscription goal. It all started when I was messing around in ProMotionNG on stream, and made something vaguely chicken nugget shaped.

It evolved into quite a funny sight: it dunks itself into a little vat of honey mustard, and wiggles around as it makes a face that could only be described as, uh, sensual, before being lifted out of the vat. If that sounds kinda weird, then I accomplished my job as artist.

The little particles of honey mustard were so satisfying to put together and animate correctly. I was laughing nearly the whole time!

This is an emote that you can use on Twitch when you subscribe to my channel.

Z-bert the Feesh

2025-07-04T00:00:00-07:00

This guy... THIS guy. This all started due to meeting al_my_pal_, who wanted to integrate something new to their stream. We lacked the knowledge to pull off what Al was going for, so we pivoted to pixel art. "That's something I can teach!"

When I was going over the basics of pixel art with them, I suggested practicing on something small and contained, like an icon of an item in a game's inventory. Nothing terribly ambitious, just enough to get a taste for it. Since we were discussing fish and playing Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Hyrule Bass came up as an option. It's an important shape to get correct, has clear opportunities to blend with gray and experiment with anti-aliasing, and there's enough detail to warrant learning how to do single-pixel lines. To me, it was a great candidate for Someone's First Pixel Art, as it were.

And so it began... I began teaching lines vs. shapes for sketching, color ramps, anti-aliasing, selective outlining, hue-shifting, lighting basics, dithering, and so on. We focused on things that maintained momentum, and would come back to things after a round of something that was going smoothly. That allowed the motivation to stay consistent and the pieces to be finished.

As an artist, I know how easy it is to get lost in, and defeated by, details. They'll suck up every ounce of your momentum, because you get in the zone and start thinking, "I must do these tasks in-sequence." Unless your target task depends on another task to be done before it, there's no reason you can't switch focus to different part of your project, and let that momentum push you further to completion in some direction, even if it's not the one that's really bugging you. You can come back to the difficult details with more confidence and a fresher eye.

Before long, we had both completed our own Hyrule Basses. Huzzah! Then someone came up with the genius idea of naming them. I still don't remember how we landed on Z-bert and Al-bert, but, yep.

He's the laughing emote on my stream, has a redeem to sing with Al-bert, relays ideas to the Discord server, and sometimes shows up uninvited, as a feesh can do from time to time.

And it all started because someone asked me to teach them The Way of the Pixel. It was a lot of fun, both to make this and to share my passion for pixels. To be real, this piece was pivotal to the momentum I gained in 2025.

Tamago_Bento's Tamagomaki-san and Tamagomaki-neko

2024-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

After a while of streaming, my partner wanted to support me by visiting the stream and participating in chat when she could. My community warmed up to her immediately, and encouraged her to get an avatar, broadcast herself, and so on.

Since my partner likes Japanese folklore and cuisine, a tamago-maki was the perfect object to make a mascot of. This is also a very Japanese thing to do; just look at the imagery used for all sorts of things from PSAs to warning labels. There's a kawaii flavor to things.

In the kawaii spirit, I gave cute pink cheeks to the sushi, and in other versions, it has a mouth. She later came back and asked me for a cat, which I happily obliged and animated for her. My community enjoyed this quite a bit, too!

The weird textures like rice, seaweed, or shaped egg, made these emotes fun projects that tested my skills. We usually shorten it to tamago-san and tamago-cat when talking about them, because it's usually clear it is in fact, sushi, and not just an egg. :)

You can enjoy both of these emotes on Twitch by subscribing to Tamago_Bento's channel. They are only available on my channel for a limited time.