#BellaGBear logo

[bellagbear]

Me being the person I am way before I even have anything resembling a finished site or a portfolio I am working on a logo. So in a way it is very fitting that the logo will be the first completed and text-edited post on this site. I designed the logo because I thought that it would be unbelievable cool to give all my embroidery and other sown artwork a ‘Sign of Sincerity in the form of the logo.

For the logo I decided on the following design parameters:

The possibility to embroider it relatively quick and easy, since it is an extra on the work and not a main feature.

It has to be a dragon, because I love dragons. Preferably a dorky dragon (have you seen the discworld’s dragons, they’re so cute!).

It would be cool if my initials, BGB, have a place in the work.

Preferably the design works on different scales from very small to big so I can adjust the size of the logo to the artwork it should be on.

So following these parameters these were the sketches I made for the logo:

The coloured one won the race. It has a very easy shape and has as little details as possible in order to be easy and quick to embroider and to make smaller when needed. Also the cartoony design allows me to use only three colours, which also simplifies the embroidery enormously (but now looking back at the sketches I might trial embroider the one left from the coloured one as well just because he looks so silly-buff). The foto beneath is the re-drawing of the chosen design.

The coloured in one won the race, which is also the reason why I coloured that one. It won because it has a very easy shape and has as little details as possible. Also the cartoony design of the dragon will allow me to use only three colours which I figured would simplify the design enormously.

I re-drew the design underneath to get a clearer idea of what I wanted and to test if my drawing skills could pull of the design multiple times. You can also see that I experimented with shrinking the design with the pink little bugger.

The biggest change I made to the original idea was to turn the frown into a smile. This because in between the different drawings I decided to be more open about my happy positive side instead of only letting the grumpy me out.

Now the design was chosen, ideas were finalized and decisions were made. The next step was to proof embroider. This I usually do on a piece of old jeans. This is mainly because I feel not bad at all when I screw up because the fabric was thrown out anyway if I would not have done anything with it. Also jeans fabric is nice to work with because it is sturdy and does not frail easily. Finally I like to embroider these loose free hand patterns on fabric instead of Aida, the embroidery stuff, because I feel it gives more movement freedom.

Below is the progress so far. I decided to use the traditional dragon colour red, brown and dark yellow, but colours can differ depending on the artwork the logo is sewn onto.

  To make my work easier I drew the design on the back of the jeans fabric. As you can see with only the red embroidery done the dragon looks just like a snail.

I did discover that I changed between using four strands and two strand somewhere halfway the red. So to prevent that next time it is best if I make notes about things like that (My mind works like a strainer if that is also a saying in English). Luckily to my untrained eye it is not that visible, so I’ll live with it for now, but it is better to take more care next time.

Above you see the logo with the finished brown. Next time I will use a darker brown on this particular fabric because the brown is not very visible. Also the contrast with the red will be better with dark brown instead of the lighter one I used now.

AND IT IS DONE!

Conclusions looking back:

Absolutely love the design. Really happy that I made the dragon look happy instead of angry. His grin is so cute and devious.

Not very happy with the colour combination. Actually they clash with each other rather horrible. No harmony between them at all. Maybe it would also have looked better to take four strands for the brown wings and two for the yellow to get the structure of dragons wings right.

Note: forgot to add lettering. Haha.. I am not even surprised I forgot something. Might do that later to see how that looks in actual embroidery.  But for now I declare this piece finished. Not sure though if that would make the logo better. What do you think?

Logo trials Me being the person I am way before I even have anything resembling a finished site or a portfolio I am working on a logo.