How Looney Luca came to be

The creation of the collection was a process that took about 7 months to complete and eventually became a family project. One day Luca came to us with some pencil drawings, creating cartoons with a main character. This character had spiky hair, big eyes, long thin legs, a naughty smile, and big feet. The cartoons were funny, and my husband made a joke about them being cool NFTs. It seemed fun to recreate my son's drawings in Procreate, so I did.

I imagined this character with red hair, just like Luca, and I felt that this character actually resembled him a lot: with a good sense of humor, a great dose of creativity, and sometimes getting himself into trouble. Luca was very enthusiastic when he saw his ideas and drawings digitally come to life and provided me with even more cartoon drawings to recreate. The Looney Luca Cartoon was born. My husband decided to put these illustrations on OpenSea, and soon we had our first sale. He started convincing me to create a Looney Luca avatar collection containing different traits, combining them into many different illustrations. It took him two more months of convincing me until I decided to actually give it a go.

The creative process

In a period of about 7 months, with some pauses, I created about 500 different traits, varying from more complex traits like detailed backgrounds to simple traits like mouths and eyes. Luca was my biggest inspiration for creating the traits, and most of them are based on his life, hobbies, and preferences. Luca was also very involved in creating the traits. I always asked his opinion when showing him new traits I drew, and sometimes he felt some traits had to be improved, changed, or added. The traits are all drawn in cartoon style, although I liked experimenting with adding textures to certain traits and playing around with different techniques and discovering new ones. As months passed, I felt some traits were not good enough anymore and started redrawing them.

In the meantime, my husband created a tool to generate the illustrations, combining the traits automatically. That seemed to be quite a complex and lengthy process, since I was not easily satisfied with the result. The tool made it easy for me to go through all the illustrations it created. With one click, I could approve or disapprove the illustrations. Luca himself sat with me many times, going through the illustrations and approving or disapproving them. Sometimes his sisters Sara and Elisa sat with us too, sharing their opinions.

There is no telling if the collection will be a success saleswise, but for us, the project has become a success anyway. It became a joint effort bringing our talents together in this project. We hope you enjoy browsing through the collection as much as we enjoyed creating it!