Hi to all Steem-cartoon followers!

Today we'll be looking at a very special competition, organized by the founders of Steem-cartoon itself.

Contest in link --> https://steemit.com/steem-cartoon/@perennial/steem-cartoon-introducing-wo-owl-announcing-our-1-challenge

In the following post, they announced our brand new official logo, which is the owl ! A very cute character if I do say so myself, and the way the logo was made is simply baffling.

Anyways, here's my entry to the contest.

Wo-Owl is the guardian of a cartoonist's sweet dreams and ideas...

It came to me that this owl should be given great power in the world of cartoon creation. This owl should be like a symbol of hope, a symbol of creativity (or a symbol of sleepiness...).

Wo-Owl is a creature of great mystery, little to none is known about this spiritual being. The only sure fact is if one dreams of the Wo-Owl, the next morning will get a brainstorm of brilliant ideas ! To be blessed with the Wo- Owl of legend is extraordinary, and it is said that all the great comics of the world came from the surge of energy given by the Wo-Owl.

Historical Art

In old cave paintings depicted by the people of the old, the Wo-Owl seems to have feature a lot of characteristics of a regular owl. The drawings below were retrieved through carbon technology, managing to trace line after line with great accuracy of the old drawings.

The pattern on its head seem to be the source of its power.

Dating back to the 1980s, this drawing came from an (unnamed) cartoonist who made a fortune off his short comic series. The owl, as depicted by him, had more cuter features.

A rare drawing of the great dream-weavers face.

I hope to one day be blessed by its presence in my dreams... and so do I hope that it happens to all the steem-cartonists. For us to be inspired by the wonderful harbinger of dreams...

This is starting to sound like a cult hahaha XD

Jokes and story-telling aside! I really liked the idea behind the Wo-Owl, its short, simple and magical.

Here's How I did It

(This part is going to ruin some of the magic)
The Wo-Owl is magical bird who releases dream dust through the wind that passes by its wings. These dust are accompanied by 'ideas'. In the drawing, I portrayed these ideas by drawing famous cartoons of the past, and some famous cartoons now (Kampung Boy, Jerry, Finn, pikachu). As well as objects that we cartoonists usually use, such as the pencil and eraser. The colours used were mostly taken from the logo itself, keeping true to its colour scheme except for the colourful rainbowy colours of the cartoon drawings.

STEP 1 : LINEART

I skipped the sketching part of the process, since I had already sketched a few basic looks of the Wo-Owl. Instead, I went straight to the clean lines of the outline. I used thin lines because I didnt really want the focus to be on the lineart.

STEP 2 : DETAILING

However, the characters in the drawings must stand out. So, I outlined wherever was necessary, and sketched a few more shades on the bodies of the characters and objects. The characters I used here were from popular cartoon shows of the past.

STEP 3 : FLAT COLOURS

Colouring with flat colours help to find the balance in the drawing. Here, most of the colours I used for the bird was taken from the logo itself.

STEP 4 : FLAT BACKGROUND AND CHARACTER COLOURS

As for the characters, I wanted them to look as though they were hand drawn, so I coloured it white for a paper look. The stardust was added to let the viewers understand more the flow of the drawing.

STEP 5 : STARS AND GLOW

Glow was added by double clicking the specific layer in your layer window, and ticking for GLOW. Afterwards I just played around with the opacity, hue and saturation.

BONUS

Deciding on the colour scheme of the owl.

Thanks for reading! See you next time :)

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