Swimming Sea Turtle from Steve's Sketchbook

Swimming By

A swimming sea turtle waving as he passes by is the latest entry in Steve’s Sketchbook.

Fans of Steve’s Sketchbook (surely there are a few) have seen a sea turtle here before. I drew this guy as one of the early sketchbook entries. This new guy pictured above has a much different look, of course. This turtle is more of a cartoon style, while the other one was more artistic in nature. However, their ocean backgrounds do have many similarities. The backgrounds are completely different pieces, but I somewhat copied the style of the first background for this one because I liked how it turned out.

I like how this sea turtle is smiling and happy, and how he is giving us a friendly wave as he swims by us. Everyone likes happy people and happy animals, right?

Sea turtles are interesting to me, as I mentioned in that earlier post. I like them so much that you can now see one every time you visit the Burnsland website…

Sea Turtle Logo

You will probably also notice that the Burnsland logo on the website is currently a stylized sea turtle, as it has been for a couple of months now. Here is a slightly better look at it:

Sometime back in the summer, I had the idea of making the Burnsland logo into a turtle. I’m really not sure where that came from, but I set to work on it in my spare time. Believe it or not, this took a few weeks to complete, mainly because I did not have much time to work on it at any one time.

This turtle turned out to be just what I was attempting to do, which is always nice because I do not have an art or graphic design background besides just the little things that I do around here on my own. I also liked the way the water background turned out. At first, I considered just re-using the background I had created for that earlier sea turtle artwork, but I decided to start from scratch.

So far, I have liked all three water backgrounds. I wonder if there is a market for creating stylized backgrounds such as that?

I am not sure how long this current logo might last. There is a good chance that you won’t see it around the Christmas holiday season, unless I adapt this one to a Christmas theme somehow. Hmm, I’ll have to think about that.

(By the way, much of the above paragraphs about the logo were taken from a Burnsland Update email from a month or so ago. Subscribe to the updates to get them delivered to your inbox. And get a free ebook for subscribing!)

Bible Verse

For I know that the Lord is great, and that our Lord is above all gods. Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps. - Psalm 135:5-6

About the Artwork

The cartoon sea turtle was once again created in Procreate on an iPad, just as several of the recent Steve’s Sketchbook entries have been done. I purposefully went with a heavy cartoon style, because that was what I had pictured in my mind.

As I mentioned in the post of The Child, I wanted to be sure to include some texture on the sea turtle. If you see a sea turtle in person or in photos, you will notice that they have heavy texture on their shells. This is especially true of the older turtles. This guy might not be all that old, but he does still have some texture to him.

Here is a look at the sea turtle from start to finish:

The sea turtle logo was created in Inkscape, an open source vector graphics program. I actually started with the main Burnsland logo and then added the turtle pieces to it. I wanted a Hawaiian kind of look for him, and I am happy with how this turned out. The background for the turtle logo was then created using Procreate, and it was all joined together in Photoshop. So there were several pieces to that logo graphic. But it was worth it.