The creation of Looney Luca

by Diana (mom)

Looney Luca Collection

Finally, after months of drawing and programming, the Looney Luca NFT collection is about to be launched on the NFT platform ‘Open Sea’ on the 2nd of June. We didn’t choose just any date, we thought the birthday of our son, real-life Luca, was the perfect occasion to launch the collection into the world.

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. It all started somewhere in September 2021 when Luca came to us with some pencil drawings. He created some 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 NFT’s. During that time I was ill with COVID and was bound to bed or the couch. So I had some spare time left, and it seemed fun to recreate the drawings of my son in Procreate.

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 Open Sea and soon we had a first sale. My husband 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. In December 2021 I started drawing.

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. When months passed, I felt some traits were not good enough anymore and started redrawing them. Finally I finished drawing the last trait in May 2022, just about 2 weeks before the collection was supposed to be launched.

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 them 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!