As a practice exercise, I designed an illustration for a place I worked as a camp counselor. I imagined it could be sold on apparel in their merch store.
Camp Birch Dill
Pickleball is a huge part of the culture at Camp Birch Hill since the camp owner has always loved paddle sports. I thought of this character in honor of him, and of the wonderful silliness of camp. The idea was to later incorporate subtext to the illustration reading “Camp Birch Dill” as a sly little tagline that the pickle might have deviously altered himself.
Development
When I image traced the sketch in Illustrator, there was a lot of work to do. I had to clean up the sketch lines and faced the challenge of replacing his right hand and paddle entirely. (this was my first substantial illustration project!)
I tried different hand concepts and paddles, and also added a sketchy tree to establish a campy setting.
When I finally got the hand right, it was time to try some different typography and variations. I tried some sporty-retro fonts but decided that the hand-written font fit the sketch style of my logo very nicely.
June 11 2025