Scottish Squash
Mascot Digital Design
In March 2021, I was approached by Scottish Squash to quote for an exciting new project. The organisation had put a call-out to their budding young players, asking them to create a new mascot, submitting a short description and a drawing of their newly imagined character.
Once the winner was chosen, I was asked to develop the child’s drawing and character into a final digital asset for use across Scottish Squash’s marketing materials.
The Winning Submission
Scottish Squash received more than 240 entries to their competition, from so many talented kids.
These were shortlisted to a top 15, with a judging panel selecting the overall winner: Callum Smith from Glasgow’s West End.
Callum created the amazing character of Vollee – a Loch Ness monster with a mohawk who carries a set of bagpipes made from squash balls and rackets due to his love for the game!
Such an imaginative character, Callum absolutely nailed it, creating a mascot who is super Scottish, happy and appealing to a wide range of people, and clearly shows his love for squash.
My development of the design
When creating the digital graphic of Callum’s design, I was conscious of making sure that the essence of his character remained front and centre; I was really just polishing the edges! I worked from Callum’s illustration as well as references supplied by the client and myself, to pull together a mood board, shown below.
From this, I first drew a black and white digital illustration of Vollee in Procreate on the iPad Pro.
Once approved by the client, I moved this black and white drawing into Adobe Illustrator to re-draw the character as a vector, before adding the colour. Creating a vector illustration meant that Scottish Squash would have an asset that can be scaled indefinitely and therefore applied to a greater range of uses.
“Graeme was incredible to work with. When we started out this partnership journey we were thoroughly impressed with the professionalism and individual approach that was taken, in order to meet our needs. As we progressed towards the final product the communication was exceptional and combined with expert technical skills, Graeme turned our winning drawing into an incredible digital masterpiece for us to promote our sport!”
- Kevin Moran, Coaching & Competitions Manager,
Scottish Squash