Adding a multi-color design element into a school mascot

My son’s girlfriend coaches high school soccer. Of course, that means I just HAVE to make her some spirit swag with the mascot. But I didn’t want just any old design. I wanted to find a way to incorporate soccer. I love the final result, so thought it would be good to share the design process I used. This is something you can do with different sports and activities.

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Get the main pieces

I start off by tracing the school mascot — a raven — to get the pieces I need.

If you intend to do something like this to sell, you need to make sure you have trademark permission.

The sweatshirt is navy blue. I’ll just be letting that show through in the design, so I don’t need to cut the dark blue piece. But I do need it — I combine it with the outer gray in a compound path. I could just group it with the beak pieces, but this makes it easier to visualize my project.

I’m doing the gray portions with silver textile foil, so cut those from Easyweed Adhesive. The eye parts are pretty easy. It’s the lighter blue feathers on the head that are the focus of this post. I want to have that be a combination of light blue, black and white in a soccer ball pattern.

Let me give you a tip at this point — make a copy of everything before you go any farther. Yes, I’ve learned that the hard way. If you get to a point where you want to change the design some, you want to have your basic pieces still.

Here’s my soccer ball:

I’m going to use the blue background in place of the gray, then the black and white pieces. So I ungroup everything, delete the gray and regroup the rest.

I also want to have a slight blue outline around the piece, so that none of the black or white is right at the edge. Because the sweatshirt is dark blue, this will help the overall picture stand out (the black won’t get lost). I do a small internal offset of the blue piece. So here’s what I’ve got at this point–

Modify

I’ll be working with the offset and the soccer ball using my Modify options. Here’s another helpful tip — set the transparency of your pieces to around 35%. That way you can lay them on top of one another and still see through.

I put the soccer ball over the offset and resize it so that it’s larger. The, I move the ball around until the portions I want to end up with are on the wing. I watch out for any areas where I would potentially end up with tiny pieces.

Now I select both the ball and the offset and in my Modify panel choose Crop. This looks at both designs and keeps only areas where at least 2 pieces overlap.

I recolor the pieces with black and white.

I group those together and center my original light blue piece with the grouping. Resetting the transparency to 0 helps to see the colors clearly.

Here’s what my final mascot design looks like. (I’ve added a dark blue rectangle to mimic the sweatshirt):

And here’s the finished sweatshirt:

Each mascot will be different. The pieces you use will vary depending on what part needs to stay original and what can be made into the pattern. You also may need to use other Modify options. One key is to do internal offsets as needed so that the pieces of your ball aren’t right next to one another (the colors aren’t touching).

Other sample mascot designs

Here are a few more designs: