'Snack Bomb' Drawing (with Blender) to Celebreate 2 Years of Snack Club

27 Dec 2022

My friends and I have a “Snack Club”. Every week or so we get on a Discord call to eat and rate snacks together. There is a Google spreadsheet we fill out and everything. We had been doing this for 2 years and had rated ~250 snacks. I combined my love of Snack Club with one of my C tier hobbies, drawing, to make a little celebratory animation thing. It is four snack mascots mixed with the idea of a Spirit Bomb from Dragon Ball (yes, really), hence I refer to it as “Snack Bomb”. See the video below or here for a high quality gif.

Behind the Scenes

What I loved about this project (and really what I love about learning about how artists make art) is the problem solving that goes into it. Even though I don’t have fundamnetal drawing skills, I can still use tools like Blender to help create my vision.

Process summarized:

• Idea/vision appeared in my head and wouldn’t go away. Fermented for a bit. Eventually compelled to make it real.
• Gather reference images. The main reference I used was cobbled together from a few different sources, including a Dragon Ball screenshot and a picture of a box I took myself.
• Paint the background. I did this in Gimp and it was heavily based on the Dragon Ball screenshot.
• Draw the lines. This was done with the grease pencil tool in Blender. A lot of this ended up being only a few steps beyond tracing. I even blurred some reference images so that I would not overly concentrate on perfect tracing (a trick I picked up from a tweet which I can’t find anymore).
• Fill in the colors and shadows. This was also done in Blender.
• Paint snack images. These were based on images of snacks we had tried. Also done in Gimp. Painted these really quickly because there were so many (and at that point I had spent way too much time on this).
• Add some “special effects”. This included a glow around the box and the characters. This was just achieved by copying the Blender objects, changing their color to white, adding a “glow” effect which would shine onto other objects, and then scaling them slightly larger than the original objects.
• Add the animation effects. A wiggle was added the lines. Gave the box’s “glow” a wave motion. The snacks were rotated in a sphere shape around the box.

Rough process from start to finish.

Mid-process sketch.

Reference images.

Drawings of snacks.