My First Wapuu: Gaspwapuua

Going into WordCamp Miami this year, I discovered the craze that is Wapuu. The little Pikachu-looking dude was everywhere! I thought it was interesting (in the “cool… but slightly odd” sense) that the original Wapuu art was licensed under the GPL rather than something better known to artistic types, like Creative Commons. But I’m guessing that was part of the intent behind the decision: to use this mascot to educate people on the license itself.

But that’s boring. You know what’s not boring? Making silly pictures!

So anyway, I learned about this Wapuu thing and almost immediately wanted to get in on the action. In particular, those wild and crazy people over in Japan really cut loose and came up with some amazing variations on the theme. It looked like each WordCamp was slowly beginning to spin up its own local version(s) of Wapuu. I wanted to do something along those lines, but didn’t know what. And since WordCamp Miami was already covered (and TBH, I don’t feel like I know Miami enough to reflect it with something like this), I started to look elsewhere. And ahead. And a little closer to home.

The pirate José Gaspar may or may not have actually existed. The legend is that around the beginning of the 19th century, he was a Spanish pirate who spent much of his time off the Gulf coast of Florida. Tampa now holds an annual pirate festival called “Gasparilla”, which is also (conveniently) the pirate’s nickname.

I thought Gasparilla was a fun concept, and was also a part of the Tampa community that was (a) quickly recognized, and (b) not related to a sports team. 🙂 So I did a quick sketch in Paper on my iPad, then imported that into Illustrator to tighten up.

It was just a fun little thing I whipped up in my free time, but I’m happy with it. Released under the GPL, I’ve got a vector version available as either PDF or SVG on Dropbox.