I made a bird

Summer is drawing to a close. How do I know? The smell of pumpkin spice is in the air, the days are getting shorter, the nights are becoming a bit more crisp, and everyone is posting Pinteresty chalkboard photos of their children (complete with age, height, weight, grade, new outfits and backpacks, career aspirations, and SSN numbers). The calendar says that Labor Day is this weekend, so that is another great clue! I’m a regular Sherlock, I tell you.

My sister is a principle at an elementary school and a few weeks ago she asked for my help with a bit of graphic design. Happy to oblige, I gave her a call for my creative brief.

The school has a patriotic eagle for the mascot. This is the only format and digital copy of the mascot that was available to her:

The file name was “eagle guy.jpg.” Perfect.

While “Eagle Guy” has some lovely character, his formatting left lots to be desired. It appears that he was hand illustrated by someone on the PTA and scanned into Microsoft Paint in 1999. The resolution, paired with his shading and line quality, just didn’t cut it for the T-shirts, newsletters, signage, and social media my sister needed him for. EGĀ  needed a clean up. I set about with my pen tool.

With a little room for some artistic leisure, EG’s colors got cleaned up, his tank top got washed, his feathers fluffed, and his anisocoria was cured! My sister also ended up with .jpg, .pdf, .png versions of EG in color and BW. She had coloring pages and ways to edit and scale her mascot. Success!

Here is the new EG. Lemme know what you think!

eagle mascot

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