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U+E000–U+F8FF, U+F0000–U+FFFFD, and U+100000–U+10FFFD can already provide you with your own emoji, as that range has been reserved for private use. Extending the range further might make sense if you need even more space in your program, but that's a lot of space already.

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2-3 bytes are not much space for anything. Sure, you could use multiple successive ones of these code points and define your own "continuation" encoding in these ranges, but that doesn't seem right to me somehow

That combination is how it already works. You can build combined "characters" (grapheme clusters) from multiple code points, e.g. you could have a "base emoji" followed by a "modifier" emoji, and AFAIK that's how emojis with different skin colors work (one code point for the base emoji (e.g. 'thumbs up'), and a number of skin color modification code points which can be applied to all emojis that involve skin color.

The point is probably to encode the emoji (image) in the codepoint itself.

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