Making a Mascot

Last weekend I was approached by a coworker to design a mascot for his flag football team. The design will be screen-printed onto jerseys and a flag. I was pretty excited for the opportunity, and I figured it would be a good blog entry to share my process.

To start, I spoke with my friend about the design. His team is called "Empty Pockets" since they are a bunch of drinking 20 somethings with no money. I decided to go with a classic football player type with the leatherhead helmets. These were my initial pen sketches I did on scratch paper at work:

He really dug the idea, so I proceeded to sketch on a 9x12 piece of bristol. I inked the head, and that was enough of a sketch to start creating a vector illustration from.

I decided to use Adobe Illustrator because I wanted to have an ultra smooth vector illustration that would look great blown up on a giant flag. So I put this guy together.  For the fun of it, I also colored him just so my friend could have a cool phone background image.

He hasn't gotten the shirts back, but I decided to make a mock design for him. He told me the jerseys would be navy blue, and the design would be screen printed in gold. If they look anything like this, I'll be stoked.