As many of you know, for the past few weeks (one, two) I’ve been working out what I want for a coffee owl mug. I continued to work on several ideas over this past week and finally came to something I liked.

It all started with the idea to ‘work smarter, not harder’ concept, and so I went through some of my old photos of the owl from the last two years and came across this one…

I quickly remembered why I hadn’t used my photos for products other than postcards before… not enough pixels. Once you crop out all the cave and stuff to just have Mama Owl as the main thing… there just aren’t enough pixels to use in a print. Which meant that I had to draw her.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve worked out just how to recreate a cute but groggy version of her, then I set out to try to work on the lettering. This required that I learn a bit of lettering… then after some time I felt pretty good with my limited skills.

Below is this past week’s iterations of ideas. I started with a composition idea then kept expanding upon it until it felt ‘right’. I added a bit of an animal flourish, based on a cat flourish that I thought was neat, and created my own owl flourish. Then I had to come up with what to do with the corners. At first I thought drawing the flowers that coffee comes from would be neat, but I thought they might be confused with holly. Plus it just didn’t have the same feel as the rest of the composition. So I took my owl flourish and made corners with it too. There, that felt right.

Then I inked and colored it. Then tested it out at both my RedBubble and Zazzle shops… currently they are still only visible to me, as I try to decide if I want to put them on other products.

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The amusing thing to me is that I ended up working harder, not smarter. I was not actually able to use my current art and just upload it to the print-on-demand sites. Instead, it was used as inspiration and a jumping off point to what I ended up with, which is something else entirely. But that is just me, I guess. I learn by having projects… and I’ve learned a lot in the past couple of weeks. And I’m happy with what I ended up with in the end.

Until next time…

~nic