38 Templates

Hello there!

Did you notice the new template?

the old banner :)

New banner!

As you can see, I'm a little reluctant to let go of my little 'duotone owl', as I dubbed him. And as much as I still love the old banner, I felt that it was a little too long and detracted from the posts-- hence the shorter, snappier new banner :) Also, how do you feel about the new chevron background? It looks a little like snakeskin in sea green, and I'm still wondering if I should change it.

On the subject of templates, I have decided --after a slew of rather disastrous online buys this month (ew)-- to finally get my act together and compile a list of what does and does not look good on me. It is by no means perfect, and I shall keep editing this as my experience grows, but hopefully this will help shorten both the time I take to get dressed and my list of online purchases gone wrong.

Actually, what Lauren Conrad's wearing in the first collage is probably 98% true to what I wear most Sundays: fit and flare dress, flap bag, nude heels. I'm so predictable...

On the down side, the pastels I love so much are --as I'm slowly learning-- not as nice in return to my skin. I have decided to take up my mum's advice and stick, as much as possible, to brights, with dashes of navy. How delectable is Constance Jablonski's dress (main picture) there?!

02 The Making Of

So, the making of the AWOL Owl! I decided that if I really wanted this blog to go further than my previous blogs, I had to do everything -or nearly everything- from scratch, using minimal resources from other websites. And as we all know, it all starts with a good mascot :)

Hooting for Inspiration

I actually have no idea how to hand-draw owls, honestly. So I had to Google and sift through info overload (and the resulting inferior feelings from really really good illustrations). Below are four favourites!

 

 

Photoshop time!

 Thank goodness for the myriad of basic shapes available. Go to 'Custom Shape Tool'. There're animal silhouettes (which I must start using immediately), cartoon faces (which I've used previously in blogskins), patterns, etc etc.

I looked at the attributes I liked most from my favourite illustrations and pulled them together. I also knew I wanted my owls to wear shades, because, you know, they're suspiciously AWOL and all that. PLUS... I really like pastels. And seafoam. So the main colour palette was already pretty much decided (can I further convince you that seafoam + light orange are a really good mix?).

To add some texture, I looked up corrugated texture to get that uneven, 3D lined feel for the main body. (Oddly enough, inspiration for this came from a visual error: the Photoshop page showed the owl as being striped when it actually wasn't, and I thought it looked better that way, so I added it in). I also used the brush tool to add some strange splotchy fur (experimented with this for a while; it might've been flowers, haha!).

The final products are the result of feedback from my parents: to add shading for the shades so it wasn't too one-note; to make the eyes open so it wasn't sleeping, and make the pupils bright and visible; and, most importantly, limit myself to 2-3 shades so it was "easier to remember" (thanks, Dad!).

Lessons from the maestros indeed.

01 How It Begins

On a side note, let me first express how very strange it is that I had been very very averse to the font Garamond before now. I always shied away from it because I thought its proportions were very strange (just look at that italic 'g'!). Then, lo and behold, when I'm looking for fonts to use in the AAO merch shebangs, it hits me that Garamond in italic is pretty cool! That said, I'm not going to start using it a lot outside of here anytime soon.

ANYHOO, how did this blog begin?? Where on earth did I get the very strange title? It was all because my classmate was texting me about this school event, and, because she was very sleepy, she wrote "absence of leave" instead of "leave of absence". And that got me thinking about acronyms about absence in particular. Then I realized AWOL (absent without leave) is an anagram of A OWL (which is grammatically incorrect).

Then, because I love confusing URLs that are very long and look very grammatically incorrect but are actually a coherent phrase, I came up with the mishmashed tongue twister 'An AWOL Owl'. A story demands to be written about this character, but in the meantime, that's the story of how this blog began!