The first emojis were introduced in 1999 by the Japanese cell phone company, NTT DOCOMO. Since then, emojis have skyrocketed into popularity. Even before generative AI, we have always been looking for ways to express ourselves with pictures. Today we’ll be teaching you how to create an emoji set: a series of emojis of the same character, showing a range of different expressions.

My personal favorite emoji set is the blk cat set: At this point, we’ve collected a blk cat for every emotion.

Having a custom set of emojis for your very own character is a great way to personalize your chat. While the blk cat set is drawn by human artists, you can create your own set of your unique character with niji.

Today, we’ll teach you how to create this saika set.

An emoji consists of 2 parts. A list of emotions and a character design.

Keep in mind that chibis work the best, since the image needs to be clear at a very small scale, and because they’re very good for expressing strong emotions.

Before we can make an emoji sheet, we need to turn the character into a chibi.

After we have the concept, the making of the emoji is done in 3 parts:

The Character reference Here is what I used for Saika. This picture is drawn by a human. (But you can use an AI image here, if you want).

You can skip to step 3 if you already have the character in the style you want!

The Style reference Remember, we want to keep it simple and chibi. This is what I used as the style reference. This picture is drawn by niji. (But you can use a human-drawn image here, with the permission of the artist, if you want!)

You can skip to step 3 if your character is already in the style that you want!

The Prompt

We’ll need the description of the character, as well as a bunch of actions, so we can get a variety of poses to choose from.

Green haired girl, with different activities, with mobile phone, reading book, sleeping.

And the result:

Remember, the key is to find a style that can express strong emotions. I was especially happy with the >_< faces on this picture.

Here, I used the vary region feature to do some light touchups, getting her hair into a bun.

Now that we have the character we want in the style we want, we will be using cref once again to make the full sheet.

The Character Reference I selected this one, because it’s a cute expression

I also need an open-eyed version of the character, since the previous example doesn’t have the eyes open.

The Prompt

green haired girl with her hair in a bun, expressions sheet, happy, sad, sleepy, crying, white background --cref link-to-your-first-image link-to-your-second-image

You can learn more about advanced character referencing here.

The resulting sheet:

To get more expressions, I can use the pan button to extend the picture: niji will keep drawing more expressions.

The last step is to cut it out of the sheet. This part, you’ll have to do in an application outside of niji (for now)

Simply screen grab the part of the sheet you want to take.

And then erase the background.

Here, I used photoshop’s magic eraser tool.

You can repeat step 3 and 4 a few times with different emotion words to create an emoji sheet!

You can add custom emojis in many chat apps these days. For example, on discord, you can do it via server settings>emoji>upload emoji

You’ll need admin privileges, so I recommend that you put this on your private server, for your personal character emojis.

Real humans faces can theoretically make any expression they want. The interesting thing about fictional characters, though, is that the expressions on expression sheet are the ONLY expressions this face can make.

Expressions are the character’s outlook on life; they reflect a certain worldview which makes the character unique. This limitation can be used to DEFINE a character. For example, I had chosen this set of expressions for saika.

But by just swapping out two of the results, I can make her feel like a different character.

In the second design, she suddenly seems more reserved and less friendly.

Many people think that characters are defined by their clothes or their accessories. While those do reflect “worldview”, they are surface level considerations. Good character design starts on the inside, and the expressions they make show the the viewer what the character is truly made of. These expressions is a reflection on the character’s creator, for no character artist will give a character an expression they hate. This is especially true of emojis, because we are literally making pictures that we want to use to convey our own emotions, as we speak.

Part of the reason I love the blk cat emoji set is because it has been drawn by so many different artists: each is a different viewpoint on why blk cat is the best: I am looking at not simply how we intended blk cat to work as a character, but the different parts of blk cat that are treasured by our fans. That is a humbling thought.

I hope you have great fun with your custom emojis!

For a limited time, we’re holding a contest for a brand new emoji to add to the niji server! Everyone is welcome to enter.

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