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.
The Idea
You can’t escape Camp Birch Hill without at least playing pickleball once. The idea came from a joke about a pickle playing pickleball, since the owner loves paddle sports. I sketched the caricature in my notebook with him in mind, and with the intent of adding text below it 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.
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.
