Wo-Owl making headlines! Icon to star in theatrical musical with new co-star!

Ello, peoples! This is my entry for @perennial's Wo-Owl Challenge #2 for the #steem-cartoon community. The theme this time around was "Retro Musical Wo-Owl" and when I saw this, I. WAS. SO. EXCITED.

Lemme explain..

Muse

I really love musicals. I MEAN, REALLY LOVE EM. So when the theme came out, it was extremely difficult for me to pick one to draw something to base on. I had to keep in mind of the Retro part of the theme too. My choices were narrowed to Heathers and the Rocky Horror Picture Show. However, when I was watching Youtube while doing work, this popped up:

And the rest was basically history from there.

Process

So conceptually, the main idea is that the Wo-Owl is his own character and since he's an icon, I thought it would be a good idea to have him be one of the main stars. One of the first challenges I faced here was actually drawing anthropomorphic owls. It's something I'm not used to at all still. I went about it by drawing some human figures and playing around with the features.

The second challenge I faced was I wanted to hint back more to the time period where Grease took place which was the late 1950s. So I did that with my lineart and the overall composition of the drawing by hinting back to 50s era comics and magazines

Image source

The colouring is fairly simplistic. A lot of the work went into arranging and figuring out what works and what doesn't. I ended up hand-writing the font for the drawing in the end (so if you're wondering why it's ugly haha).

I opted to make the cover look more textured and aged. I actually prefer when magazines become a bit more aged and that it's obvious to the eye. For me, it adds that character needed to breath life.

Process GIF

And that is about it~ There's quite a number of beautiful pieces in this contest so wishing all best of luck! Until then...

See you next post!