Hello Reader, it's lovely to be back in your inbox!
The Votes Are In 🌲
You may remember that in my last newsletter I asked which of my Woodland Friends you would trust with the map.
Well, the votes came in…
Owl had her supporters. 🦉
Hedgehog had his. 🦔
And Fox? 🦊
Fox appears to have very quietly avoided the entire situation. Whether that's because he's shy, particularly clever, or simply knows better than to volunteer for navigation duty, I'll leave you to decide. 😂
Meanwhile, back in the woods, somebody had to take charge of the map!
Hedgehog stepped up.
Hedgehog taking charge. Sort of 🗺️!
🗺️ There was just one teeny, tiny problem: nobody told him which way up to hold it. Judging by Owl’s expression, I think she’s noticed. One quick flight above the treetops could solve it, but she seems perfectly happy to let Hedgehog enjoy his moment.
As for Fox? I like to imagine he's somewhere just out of shot, watching everything unfold and feeling extremely pleased with himself. 🦊😂
Thank you to everyone who joined in with my little question. Your answers inspired me to continue the story and draw what happened next, which is exactly the sort of unexpected little detour I love taking with my characters. 💙
And while these three work out exactly where they're going, there's someone else I'd like you to meet. 🤖
Pip, the friendly robot
Pip has been quietly hanging around the Blue Owl Crafted world for a while now, usually carrying a heart, a star, or getting himself involved in some other small adventure.
What started as one cheerful little robot soon turned into a whole collection of poses and personalities, because apparently one Pip was never going to be enough.
Pip loves to hang out
From Robot to Sticker
Eventually, several of those little Pips found their way onto a sticker sheet.
Pip loves to stick around
There’s something especially satisfying about seeing a character move from the sketchbook into something you can actually hold, peel off, stick somewhere, or give to somebody else.
And, as it turns out, Pip was quite keen to start traveling.
Pip checks out the local lending library!
One of my favorite little Pip experiments happened when I took some of his stickers along to a cute local lending library and left them there for someone to discover.
They disappeared surprisingly quickly.
So naturally, I went back and did it again.
Those disappeared too.😂
Pip checked out the local library and went on his adventure twice!
From My Sketchbook to Their World
It was such a small thing, but I loved knowing that somewhere out there, somebody had unexpectedly discovered one of my little robots and decided to take him home.
That is one of my favorite parts of creating things: the moment something that started as an idea in my sketchbook heads off into somebody else's world.
Before I Go...
🦉The Blue Owl Workshop is open 🦉
I’ve been quietly building something new, and because you’re already here in my little newsletter crew, I wanted you to be among the first to know about it.
The Blue Owl Workshop is a growing collection of small, free tools designed with iPad and Procreate users in mind, for those little bits of creative work that interrupt the drawing. Working out what size canvas a print needs. Squinting at a pattern tile and wondering if it really repeats. Typing twenty hex codes into Procreate by hand.
The first four are ready:
The Palette Tin- build a color palette, see how it holds together, then send it straight to Procreate as a real .swatches file.
The Repeat Room - drop in a pattern tile and see whether it actually repeats, and where the seam is hiding if it doesn’t.
The Canvas Calculator - work out the canvas size and resolution you need before you start drawing, rather than discovering the problem afterwards.
The Crop Corner - see what your artwork loses when it’s cropped into different proportions before you commit to one.
They’re free to use, there’s nothing to sign up for, and they run entirely in your browser, whether that’s on your iPad or your computer. Anything you load stays on your own device.
So far, they’ve mostly behaved themselves on my own iPad. I’d love to know what happens when they venture out into the wild.
If you have ten minutes, try it with something you’re already working on and tell me how you get on, whether that’s on your iPad or computer, especially if anything looks odd, feels confusing, or refuses to cooperate.
“The buttons look strange on my iPad” is exactly the kind of feedback I want to hear. 😂
And one more thing...a little something for those who were here early 💜
When you joined my newsletter, there wasn’t a free download waiting at the door. You simply chose to come along for the creative journey, which means a lot to me.
So before I start offering my new free welcome gift to future subscribers, I wanted to make sure you received it first.
I hope you enjoy the tools and little gifts, and if you have time to give some feedback, just hit reply. I read every one.
