One day I sit down... I wanted to draw something Luck(?) would have it that I was just playing around with my pups and had some fun energy kicking around as a result. My dogs, you see, are avid hunters and bug catching is something they pride themselves on. That thought just stuck and I ended up sketching out my pup hunting fireflies in the backyard and it was so adorable I felt the need to capture it with some pixels.

An hour or so later I had a .aseprite file looking something like:

While cute, this isn't logo material. I expect a logo to be quick to read with a minimal palette. This typically means your focus should have a strong silhouette, so let's see what that looks like...

The result looked... roughly dog shaped. Not spectacular though. So, it was time to look to some inspiration via some web scouring. As I search about, I notice my fellow logo artists are using negative space to define features of the subject that we might normally draw out by utilizing color differences. So I take a stab at that:

That definitely reads more dogly! But something is still off. The nose appears to simply be chopped off and the handkerchief as negative space makes the head look entirely detached. I play around with smaller lines and different shapes and locations for these two things but nothing looks right. At this point, I decide to convert to white (like my pup is!) and give up on a single shade as I push some grays into the mix.

This is what I am looking for! Just two shades in the main subject and I am seeing a dog with a kerchief. From here it is a relatively quick series of a resizing and positioning to get him onto a plaque. I push through to get text in for Fire Catcher Games (FCG), and give it the shade of light from the very firefly he was chasing.

A couple of hours and I am feeling pretty good about this design. Looking forward to adding it to my works and eventually getting some animation behind it!

-TheHocken