I had another idea thanks to all the suggestions. Going for a dark theme and forgoing gradients and landscapes this time, might just make a different theme submission altogether.
Thoughts on this? I feel much stronger about this concept.
@cds60601 thank you for the kind words, the dark theme did inspire me in fact.
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I'm going to try to outline how I formulated my idea about this one, as it's fresh in my mind. So after some of the suggestions about the theme reflecting on dachshunds (Andy's dog buster from toy story), I started thinking how I could implement the idea without redrawing buster completely. At first I thought of doing a detailed vector dog, but then I felt it was too literal. I then stumbled upon picaso's hand drawing of his dachshunds, and while the drawing is just a squiggle, I really liked the concept of a single line.
I did a quick mouse sketch, but standing didn't feel right, so some modifcations and the semi sitting pose felt more right, I also removed the eye because I felt it wasn't needed to convey the concept and would be odd to have the dog looking at you.
I made a line vector in Inksape using a single line.
Afterwards I spent ages trying to figure out colors, brown looked bad on the dog, and then it struck me my drawing looked like a bird! So I had to modify it until it felt right.
Afterwards I was struggling with the color scheme, no amount of fills and gradients or colors seemed to be working for the background or line drawing. I re-read the thread and the wallpaper cds60601 posted gave me an idea to use darker colors for once and try a solid fill. For the line colors, i also noticed the background wallpaper in andy's room has a nice blue to green combination, I played around with it until I felt it looked nice, not identical but I feel it works.
I also felt that cramming the debian logo or debian text would not be necessary as just a hint of it works well as a background pattern in my opinion, was a little inspired by Ubuntu's wallpapers as they don't include ubuntu's logo either. (However the eye of the beaver kind of freaks me out and the colors are a little too much).