Octopus, Trees, and Owl

I was looking for some vector tutorials for Illustrator backgrounds that I might use for comics when I stumbled upon 40+ Cartoon Character Illustration Tutorials. I’ve been doing a lot of drawing the past few years and these helped me realize I could also draw with Illustrator. Duh.

I followed the Create a super-happy octopus character tutorial fairly close to produce the following:

I then looked at Create the first page of a fairy-tale storybook, with a hint of kitsch for inspiration to make this: