I adore owls, so the theme animal for this project was a no-brainer for me. In thinking of what phrase to use, the saying "night owl" came to mind immediately, which is great because I AM a night owl. In trying to create a more personal piece, I came up with my own wording:

The night owl dreams of being an early bird

I did some initial brainstorming and then began sketching... REALLY rough sketching: 

Because this is a longer phrase, I started creating thumbnails, as opposed to just single-word sketches. Here are three, and I'm working on more.

A few more  rough thumbnail sketches: 

Here's a slightly more refined version of one of the thumbnail sketches. I decided not to go with this one though:

Below: This is the one I think I am going to go with. It's a refined version of one of the thumbnail sketches above. This is one where I had to keep the final colors in mind when doing the sketch. In the end, I'd like the background on the top to be a dark blue, reflecting night time. The letters will therefore have to be a light color. The bottom area, inside the dream bubble, may be a lighter blue, so the letters will be dark. 

As a funny side note, I was initially aiming at making the owl look more realistic and less cartoony... but even when I draw owls DIRECTLY from a photograph, they look like cartoons. I guess that's one of the things I find endearing about them. :-) 

My next step will be to ink and digitize...

Here is the inked version:

And here is the final, digitized version. I brought it into Photoshop first, for some minor clean-up. Then it was vectorized and colored in Illustrator. The final texture was added back in Photoshop.

And a version without the drop shadows :-)