Twitch Emotes and Discord Stickers: The Commission Niche Nobody Teaches
Small canvases, repeat clients and a steady market almost no art tutorial covers. Here are the exact specs, realistic rates, and the design rules that make an emote readable at 28 pixels.
There’s a corner of the commission market that almost no art tutorial covers, where the canvas is 112 pixels wide, the clients come back every few months, and the work arrives in batches of ten.
Emotes and stickers are unglamorous. They’re also one of the most reliable ways for a character artist to earn — because every streamer who grows past a handful of subscribers needs them, most of them need more later, and comparatively few artists are actually good at making them.
Why this niche is worth your time
The clients repeat. A streamer who commissions five emotes and hits a growth spurt needs five more. Then sub badges. Then seasonal variants at Halloween and Christmas. One good client can be a recurring booking for years, which is a rare thing in commission work.
They refer each other. Streamers are unusually networked — they collaborate, raid, and sit in each other’s Discords. Emote artists get recommended in a way that portrait artists usually don’t.
The briefs are small and finite. “Draw my character crying laughing” is a contained job with a clear finish line. Compare that to a full illustration where scope quietly triples. Small pieces mean faster turnarounds, faster payment, and much less risk of a project dragging on for two months.
The competition is thinner than it looks. Plenty of artists can draw a cute face. Far fewer understand that the image will be displayed at 28 pixels, and design accordingly. That gap is the entire opportunity.
The specs, exactly
Get these wrong and the client can’t upload the files. Get them right and you look like a professional on day one.
Twitch emotes
| Sizes | 112×112, 56×56, 28×28 px |
|---|---|
| Format | PNG with transparency |
| File size | Under 25KB per size (static) |
| Animated | GIF, up to 1MB per size, 60 frames maximum |
Twitch sub badges use their own sizes — 72×72, 36×36 and 18×18 px. Badges sit next to a username in chat and are effectively always seen at the smallest size, so they need to be even simpler than emotes: one shape, one idea, high contrast.
Discord emoji
| Size | 128×128 px |
|---|---|
| File size | Max 256KB |
| Animated | GIF only |
Discord stickers
| Size | Exactly 320×320 px |
|---|---|
| File size | Max 512KB |
| Format | PNG, or APNG for animated |
Two traps worth memorising. First, Discord stickers do not accept GIF — animated stickers must be APNG, which is a genuinely different export and the single most common delivery mistake in this niche. Second, Discord emoji are the opposite: GIF only, no APNG. Yes, the same platform, opposite rules.
Deliver all required sizes, exported and checked, rather than one large file with a note saying “just resize it.” Downscaling is where the readability dies, and it’s your job.
The design rules that actually matter
This is where most illustrators fail their first emote job. The instinct is to make a small, beautiful illustration. The correct instinct is to make a symbol that survives being shrunk to the size of a full stop.
Design at the final size, not just for it. Keep a 28×28 preview visible while you work. Every decision gets checked against it. If you only zoom out at the end, you’ll discover the whole thing reads as brown mush and have to start over.
Silhouette first. If the black shape of the emote is unreadable, no amount of rendering will save it. Exaggerate the pose, tilt the head, throw the hands out wide. Emotes are closer to logo design than to illustration.
One emotion per emote, pushed to eleven. Subtlety is invisible at this scale. “Mildly amused” doesn’t exist as an emote. Tears should be fountains, blushes should be radioactive, rage should have visible steam.
Cut detail ruthlessly. Individual fingers, hair strands, eyelashes, patterned clothing, small text — all of it turns to noise. Simplify to the two or three features that make the character recognisable, then delete everything else.
Contrast beats colour accuracy. A character’s canonical navy hoodie may need to become considerably brighter to separate from a dark chat background. Clients generally understand this if you explain it; the alternative is an emote nobody can see.
Test on both chat themes. This is the step people skip. Paste your emote onto a dark grey background and a white one. A black outline vanishes on dark themes; a pale character disappears on light. The standard fix is a thin light outline, a subtle outer glow, or a chunky outline in a mid-tone that survives both.
Think in sets, not singles. Emotes are bought in batches and need a shared visual language — same line weight, same outline treatment, same head proportions. A set that looks like one family is worth noticeably more than five unrelated drawings.
If you’re building a recognisable look for this kind of work, our guide to finding your art style applies here more than most places: streamers are explicitly shopping for a style.
What to actually draw
Streamers order from a surprisingly consistent vocabulary. If you’re building a sample set with no client yet, these are the safe bets — they’re what gets requested over and over:
- Love / heart hands — near-universal, usually the first emote ordered
- Laugh / crying-laughing
- Sad / crying
- Rage — steam, red face, clenched fists
- Hype / celebration
- Lurk — character peeking from behind something, a streaming-specific staple
- Wave — hello and goodbye
- Cosy / comfy — blanket, hot drink; enormously popular
- Shock / surprise
- Thinking / suspicious side-eye
Draw a set of these for an original character of your own and you have a portfolio piece that demonstrates the whole skill: consistency, range, and readability at size.
Pricing the work
Rates in this niche vary a lot with experience, but the shape of the market is consistent. Established artists commonly sit around US$25–60 for a single static emote, with set pricing that discounts the per-unit rate — ten emotes for meaningfully less than ten times the single price, because the shared style work is done once.
Beyond that, the add-ons are where this niche gets interesting:
- Animated emotes typically run two to three times the static rate. Animation is a genuinely separate skill, and the 60-frame ceiling makes it a real constraint. If you can animate, you can charge for it.
- Extended commercial rights — the client putting the design on merchandise, or reselling it — are charged separately, often as a substantial per-emote add-on. Standard emote pricing should cover use as an emote, not unlimited commercial exploitation.
- Sub badges are usually priced below emotes individually and sold as tiered sets.
- Rush fees for turnaround inside a week.
Our commission pricing guide covers the underlying maths of not underselling yourself, and it applies here with one adjustment: do not price emotes by canvas size. A 112-pixel image can easily take longer than a full-body illustration, because fitting a readable character into 28 pixels is a design problem, not a rendering one.
Put the rights terms in writing before you start. “You may use these as emotes on your Twitch and Discord; merchandise rights are available separately” is one sentence that prevents a genuinely unpleasant conversation later. The commission scam red flags are worth reading too — small, cheap-looking jobs attract chancers who assume you won’t push back.
Getting the first client
The awkward truth: streamers hire emote artists by seeing emotes. Not illustrations, not character art — emotes, ideally as a clean sheet showing the set at display size.
So the sequence is:
- Draw a speculative set of six to ten emotes for your own character. Nobody is going to commission you on the promise that you could probably do this.
- Present them properly. Show the full-size art and a strip of them at actual chat size on both a dark and a light background. That single presentation choice signals that you understand the medium, and it’s what separates you from every illustrator who has never thought about it.
- Make them findable. Tag the work for what it is — emotes, sub badges, Discord stickers, Twitch — because that’s the language clients search in.
- Be visible where streamers already are. Adjacent niches overlap heavily; if you’re drawn to this work, our VTuber commissions guide covers a closely related market with much the same client base.
- Deliver like a professional. Correct sizes, correct formats, a tidy folder, and a note on how to upload. Streamers are not designers, and the artist who makes the upload painless is the artist they recommend.
Final thoughts
Emote work won’t get you admired on the timeline. What it will do is pay reliably, teach you more about readability and shape design than a year of rendering practice, and connect you to clients who come back — which, for most working artists, is worth considerably more than applause.
The whole thing rests on being findable by a streamer who needs ten emotes next month. That’s a portfolio problem, and it’s the one artbase is free to join for: your emote sheets, sub badges and sticker sets sitting together in a collection, tagged so the people searching for exactly this work can actually land on it — instead of buried three weeks deep in a feed nobody scrolls back through.
Frequently asked questions
What size should a Twitch emote be?
Twitch emotes are uploaded in three sizes: 112x112, 56x56 and 28x28 pixels, as PNG files with transparency. Static emotes must be under 25KB per size. Animated emotes are GIF, can be up to 1MB per size, and are limited to 60 frames. Sub badges use a different set of sizes: 72x72, 36x36 and 18x18 pixels.
What size are Discord emoji and stickers?
Discord custom emoji are 128x128 pixels with a maximum file size of 256KB, and animated emoji must be GIF. Discord stickers are different: exactly 320x320 pixels, up to 512KB, in PNG or APNG format. Regular GIF is not accepted for stickers, which catches a lot of artists out.
How much do artists charge for Twitch emotes?
Rates vary widely with experience and style, but a common range for a single static emote from an established artist is roughly US$25 to $60, with set discounts bringing the per-emote price down. Animated emotes typically cost two to three times the static rate. Extended commercial rights, such as putting the design on merchandise, are usually charged as a separate add-on.
Do I need to be good at illustration to draw emotes?
You need different skills rather than more advanced ones. Emote work rewards clear silhouettes, bold shapes, strong colour contrast and exaggerated expression, because the final image is often displayed at 28 pixels wide. Rendering skill matters far less than readability at tiny sizes, which is why many technically strong illustrators make poor emotes on their first attempt.
Where do emote artists find clients?
Mostly through streamers seeing finished emote work and recognising the style. That makes a visible, well-tagged portfolio of emote sheets the main marketing tool. Streamers also tend to recommend artists to each other, so the niche produces an unusual amount of word-of-mouth and repeat business once you land the first few clients.