Drawing a blank

I am drawing a blank on a product idea. I'm trying to step out of my confort area and do something that is different and would be challenging, but nothing's come to me yet.

Clipping mask exercise.

I am almost finished with this exercise. First I started with the bottom two words, both of which were not too difficult, having used a clipping mask before. I first placed/created the image and gradient; then added the type. After adding the type, I made both the outline and fill of the letters blank, then selected both the type layer and background image/gradient and went to object>clipping mask>make.
The top exercise was the trickiest, as advertised...I struggled with drawing lines, then creating boxes that I filled with the various colors until I figured out that there is a tool to create a grid. It's grouped under the line tool and looks like a grid. Using the grid tool, I created the grid then used Live Paint to fill in the various boxes with their appropriate colors. After doing that I created the two text boxes with 'Kids' and 'Play' and then joined the two boxes using the Pathfinder tool. Doing that enabled me to use both as a clipping mask, so that when I selected those boxes and the grid and created my clipping mask, both words were used as the mask.

Updated Ibis

Taking some of the suggestions into account, I made some changes for this version. The text boxes are moved away from the rounded background shape, the inside of the body has been lightened to show more of the letterforms, I removed the second star, and I moved the scientific name to under the large 'Ibis'. I think this layout works a little better than the original.

National Zoo Poster

I'm about a blog behind on this project.

I started off by hitting the National Zoo site and initially selecting a Porcupine to work with (not for any particular reason, but I thought I'd draw him hanging from a branch). I worked a little bit on this, then came back a week later and realized the porcupine was basically all upper case 'I's used as his "prickles" and decided it wasn't very interesting.

Going back to the site, the animal that grabbed my attention was the Scarlet Ibis. This interesting bird is all scarlett, except for the beak and tail feathers. I started by placing the image I had into my document, then using that as a basis for my illustration I chose a font (helvetica for long clean lines) and began placing letters. My process for this was (over and over): create text box, enter a letter, change to outlines, scale to size, then rotate and put in place. Almost all of my letters are recognizable, except for the upper-case I's I used as the beak, which I warped a bit to make into a beak. Also hard to see are the 'B's I used to indicate the knees- 2 for each knee, places back to back. The eye is a white 'e' behind a black 'c'.