I admit this is something I've tried a bunch of times and I don't feel like I'm very good at it. But, in the spirit of the challenge I decided to give this another chance.
You see, I can't work small. I've tried. Even in my quilting I've tried. So, to help me through that, I started with very small paper. I created hand doodles in pencil, and then traced over the designs in pen and marker.
I'm not sure where I originally got the idea that happiness is a mushroom, but there is something very whimsical and mysterious about mushrooms and so it's stuck. I also decided that the mushroom spots, should be paw prints to represent my pups. Happy stuff and dogs. That about sums up what I ramble about these days.
Once the line drawing was complete. I scanned it in and loaded into GIMP to crop, add color, and scale the drawings.
This is a picture of the computer screen showing the first round of coloring I tried.
Here is an idea of how the button looked. Something was off with it, right? The letters were too muddy and the top of the mushroom popped in the wrong way. But, this is why I like using a digital editor so much. It's a few clicks to change the color around.
As you can see I went through a few iterations until I realized that my blog name just wasn't big enough to be legible once I shrunk the icon down to actual size. Nothing a quick re-draw couldn't fix. I also highlighted the paw spots in a yellow to bring them out better.
And after much playing here is the button I decided on. I still see little things that I would or could change, but we'll call it done for now. This was a really fun experiment in visual branding and I also welcomed the GIMP practice!
You can find out about the next weekly challenge and see what the other artists put together at the co-op blog. I can't wait to see what Mr. T has in store for his own button re-do!
Wishing you puppy licks and sunshine!
