twitch

I started streaming in the summer of 2015. At first I’d tried Picarto because it was for actual artists. It was a nice community but I didn’t want to send people to my art stream and have them hit the wall of furry porn coming in. So next I tried Youtube, where I made a few connections, did some art for other streamers for free advertising and learned a lot there. After that I tried Twitch. At the time it didn’t officially recognize art streamers. Technically it was against the EULA, but if you didn’t rock the boat, we had a cool secret club where almost every artist got drunk and hung out on each other’s streams. It was at Twitch I came up with the name “Art Now Sleep Later” and created Zombro!

Everything back then was clunky and raw, it was a blast! The technology to stream was bad, you had to figure out how to code crap to get it to work, web cams were kinda crappy still. It was very DIY. Which was right up my alley. I’ve been tinkering with website building and animated gifs since the 90’s so this was my playground. So it was official, only a few months after learning that live streaming was a thing I was happy to call myself one.

I don’t stream as much anymore. Raising kids, having clients I can’t show what I’m working on, getting older…a lot of stuff between me and the glory days. A while will pass and I get the itch again. It’s all ups and downs but it stays in your blood after you get a taste for it.

overlays

Overlays are like they sound. They are the graphics that lay over the main video of your stream. They contain useful information, alerts and are the best way to show your personality and brand. I’ve made so many of them for myself I can’t remember half of them anymore. Lucky for you I was able to get the last couple together (which are the best ones) and show you around my process, how they work and so on.

My most recent overlay

I think this captures the overall vibe of Kevin. A lot of research went in to it’s proportions and animations.

A breakdown of the overlay being born.

The overkill Zombro overlay before my recent one

This one was very ambitious, but I learned a ton from the experience!

Graphics & Alerts

Not only do you have the main graphics of your overlay, you have alerts, transitions and sound cues to think about too. They have tons of these to buy and download nowadays, but you know Kevin makes his own. Below is a video with a bunch of different background gifs, alerts, audio and goofiness I’ve created over the years. For a while my stream was called Odd Ninja as I tried to merge my tshirt biz Odd Ninja with Art Now Sleep Later. It didn’t last. Towards the end of the video you’ll hear my kids when they were waaaay younger, so cute.