Hey there! :D

Today's post will be my first participation in a contest that is held by @perennial, Co-Founder of Steem-Cartoon and the judging will be done by the one and only @sireh, Founder of Steem-Cartoon. This is Steem-Cartoon's first ever challenge, if you are wondering.

I'm glad they finally did this! Steem-Cartoon has been doing a lot of stuff for the past few months - from building a community, getting their work displayed in a museum and not to mention an overwhelming emotional roller-coaster ride for @sireh. I hope he is well after what he has been through.

I'm doing this to support the Steem-Cartoon and hope they will get noticed by the Steemit community. It's been a great journey for them all.

Recently, they finally created a logo of their own. It is official that the mascot for Steem-Cartoon is in fact, an owl. I gotta say, it does fit among the artist, where they are commonly known to pull an all nighter xD

(Kudos to @cartoonistpandan for this amazing logo!)

As for the challenge, it asked the participants to create an artwork based on the theme 'Fantasy'. As a mech enthusiast, I'm already in a disadvantage... but I'm not gonna give up that easily!

1) The Design Ideation

I decided that I would just try to take the owl mascot for my main fantasy object. As for the fantasy factor, I'll try make it into a human. (Simple!)

While searching for idea, I remembered a game called Gigantic also has an owl themed hero named Tyto, the Swift, where he fights using a sword, along side his cat-like mouse side-kick.

After further research, I realized that Tyto is actually the name of the breed of the owl itself. On the other hand, I imagined the owl in the Steem-Cartoon logo resembles a lot like the Great Horned Owl.

From that point, I got an idea to just reverse engineer Tyto's design and try to make my owl character really contrasted to him. There, I choose to make mine an archer. Not to mention Steemit's cool blue-green colour in its logo is coincidentally a great contrast to Tyto's warm crimson red colour. (It was just perfect!)

2) The Execution

With all the ideas that I have gathered, I experimented with random strokes and scribbles in my sketches. I'm trying to capture a visual of what my owl character would look like. After a few random doodling moment later, the sketch finally takes form and looked something like this.

I then proceed to get the details even more than stand out by doing bold line art on it.

Next up is filling it up with the colours. Again, the colour pallets are based on the Steemit logo.

Now, all is left is the rendering! :D ...and VOILA, Hoot, the Hunter is ready to be in the spotlight!

3) Process Progress GIF

From rough sketch, to line art, to colour and lastly, the render :D

Aight, that is all from me! I hope you guys enjoy this artwork I made. It was really fun doing it! Be sure to visit and check out other fellow participant's artwork here in the comment section. They did a really great job creating awesome artwork for this contest.