I recently decided it would be fun to send a gift to my teammates. I had a great time playing around with different concepts for a Wapuu that would represent our team. If you aren’t familiar with Wapuu, you will want to check out the history on wapuu.jp.
I finally figured out what to do, with some help from, Ryan, who very kindly helped me put together the various pieces I needed to make the overall design. He also gave me the tip for getting the outline onto the notebooks, making it easier to then color in.
Ingredients:
- White acrylic paint pen
- Gel pens
- Gel markers
- Moleskines
I grabbed the pieces that I needed: Fire Wapuu, a large flame for the background, and our team logo (the owl pictured). Once Ryan superimposed the pieces on each other in Photoshop, I printed it out on regular copy paper. Then I rubbed chalk on the back of the sheet, laid it on the notebook, and traced it. Once the outline was in place I colored it in with the white acrylic pen, gel pens, and markers.
The acrylic pen was a huge pain, super messy, but it was all I could find that would make a really white layer on the notebooks. I was in a hurry so I didn’t search all over town, but if I were to do it again, I would try to find a better tool.
What’s with the fire?
My team and I help find amazing Happiness Engineers to join Automattic to provide support for WooCommerce, WordPress.com, Jetpack, VaultPress, Akismet, essentially all the Automattic products. We’ve been working really hard to grow our team over the last few years and last year our CEO complimented us, telling us that we were on fire. It caught on and we often refer to our status as #enfuego and #onfire.
What’s with the owl on Wapuu’s tummy?
Teams at Automattic take interesting names. We have teams that go by the names Apollo, Hermes, Sparta, Tardis, Eshu, Tinker, you name it, we’ve got it. My team is officially called the Happiness Hiring team. But, sometime ago, Nick Hamze suggested we call our team Athena. Instead of officially changing our name, we took Athena on as our mascot. She fits our team since she is independent, wise, and extroverted. She is an energetic woman of action and is always hungering for knowledge. In stories, she is typically concerned with education, culture, and social issues. Athena is often pictured with an owl and a snake. As I hate snakes more than anything, we also took the owl as a secondary mascot.
Karen Alma 
Notebook game on fleek.
+t+d