During the week my "sub-o-meter" rolled past 900. Thanks everyone! For my special, I decided to do something definitely non-medieval, to give you something different to look at.

While surfing the web, I stumbled across Captain Penny a steam powered penguin robot connected to one of the characters on Monster High (I've never actually seen the series). This got me thinking that it would be fun to design a happy-go-lucky, fuzzy duckling wearing a jet pack with an aviator cap and goggles.

Those of you who read my "skinning illusions" blog will be interested in investigating how I use the interaction between the head and hat layers to create the googles and aviator cap.

I used a new technique to generate my gradients which I wanted to look smooth and warm. It might be worth a separate blog posting - it was fun but time consuming...