2022 Ecency Art Conest

About a week ago I saw the Ecency art contest. I remembered it from last year - and the sad fact that I didn't enter. That's not going to happen this year! Or is it?

If you look at the time it is now 9 am EST as I am starting to type up this post and the deadline for submissions is - 11 am EST. With my creative juices being so... stop-and-go at the moment I am thankful that I finished my little illustration last night. Okay, I thought tomorrow morning is enough time to get the screenshots and write the post. Yeah, and then I slept in for the first time in forever.

But enough of that, on to Ecency. If are here on the Hive blockchain and possibly blogging and you don't know Ecency you must be living under a rock. If you just crawled out from under it... Ecency is another front end for Hive blogging. You can create your posts, save a draft, read, comment, upvote, and - you earn Ecency points doing all of it. These points have a $ value that you may use to boost your own or another Hivian's post or to promote it which then shows it prominently in users' feeds. Personally, I use Ecency mostly when I'm not at home i.e. in the phone app which is super convenient. I also just realized that on the phone you can have multiple post drafts which is something that is missing (so far) in the desktop app. Speaking of missing, these drafts are not syncing between app and desktop.

Now my illustration for their art contest. Initially, I looked through their available assets you can find on Ecency's discord, and pretty quickly I fell in love with their cute and cuddly little whale(?) It is super cute with those big googley comic eyes.

I had to draw an Ecency whale

Which is totally legit considering how big Ecency has got over the last year or two. Their user base seems to have exploded recently - so a whale it is. I started sketching in Procreate and, well, they're sketches, right?

I then decided to make my whale slightly less cuddly cute and looked up 'humpback whales'. To me, they always seem to have an elongated head, very small flippers considering their overall size, and that stripey belly. Et voila - on the bottom right is the final sketch.

I imported the last sketch into Affinity Designer and started to vectorize it for scalability. Also, vector art gives you this very clean and crisp look which is preferable in logos for obvious reasons. I didn't take screenshots of all the steps and little changes but here is a gif of the almost final to final version. Along the way I added an Ecency coin and stars - there have to be stars, always.

And here is the final version as a png with a transparent background which you Hive account@melinda010100 may add to the Ecency assets if you like.

Have a great rest of your day!

Cheers,
(Ocean)Bee

p.s. now it is 9:47 am EST and I am going to hit post - personal record in writing this post, please forgive any typos or such 😅

pps. Being the Ecency art contest - I really should have posted this using Ecency - duh! Bad me!!