Mobius the Surfing Goat

Catch a Wave

Mobius the Goat enjoys the sun while checking out the waves at Anahola Beach on the island of Kauaʻi in Hawaiʻi. He might go out surfing and catch a wave later on, or he might just enjoy having his hooves in the water. How does a goat go surfing and hang ten with only two hooves and no toes, anyway?

Devoted Burnsland readers know of my love for photography. You also know of my fondness for drawing things in the last year or so since I started the Steveʻs Sketchbook series. So I decided to combine the two by dropping Mobius the Goat into a photo that I took.

The result that you see here is somewhat the inverse of what we have been doing for our Christmas cards over the last several years, where I put photos of us into drawn backgrounds. And in some ways, this process is slightly easier, because I do not have to carefully remove the unwanted portions of the photo around us. I just draw what I want on top of the photo. Plus, this was slightly easier than some of the drawings that I have done, because I did not have to draw a background, but rather only the character.

And yes, I do plan to do more of these in the future. They might not all feature Mobius, but that remains to be seen. I am searching for just the right ideas.

About the Artwork

I started by importing the original photo into the Procreate app on my iPad, and then I drew what I wanted with the photo as the background. Here is an early version in the process:

I imported the photo in Procreate and then reduced the opacity of the photo quite a bit so that I could see what I was doing. For starters, I did the rough sketch in blue just to get everything worked out. After that, I did the final lines in black. What you see here are both the blue sketch and the black outlines on top of the blue. I do always like the sketch look, so I enjoy sharing that here sometimes.

Once I added color to the version above, I realized that the overall color just was not right. That was because I had used the photo straight out of the camera and then placed a vibrant color character on top of it. So next I did what I should have done at the beginning, which was to process the photo as I normally do in Luminar AI. Actually, I pushed the color saturation a bit more than what I have been doing in the recent past, just to be sure that it was enough color to go with Mobius’s yellow shirt. Once I loaded the new photo in as the background, everything looked much better, and that is what you see at the top of this post.

By the way, the photo was from our 2018 Kauaʻi Trip, but you probably knew that already. And we did not actually go surfing while we were there, although we did visit lots of beaches. Check out the trip report for more photos, minus the goat.

Bible Verse

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. - Colossians 3:12-13