Dragons, hippos and Octopussy...more of my crazy BJJ logos!

It never ceases to amaze me the imagination of instructors and academy owners who suggest logo ideas for me to draw. Here are some recent designs I have created. Enjoy!

Greg Creely is a BJJ brown under black belt Pedro Bessa. Greg's own nick-name is 'hippo' so naturally he requested that I draw a cartoon hippo in a BJJ stance. And this is what I did:

and here is the design printed as a patch (thanks to Tatami Fightwear's patch printing service):

I always get a huge buzz whenever I see my work printed on real physical objects. It's such a long process from start to finish that it is sometimes hard to visualise the end product. I mean, there are so many variables to consider, for example, as you can see from one of the original sketches below, do I go for open mouth or closed mouth? Questions like that plague every design I create and it's often a matter of personal judgement as well as a lot of to'ing and fro'ing between myself and the client.

My next assignment was for a hugely popular grappling academy called Leicester Shootfighters. Their head coach, Nathan Leverton, asked me to come up with a replacement for their flying dragon logo - seen here:

The main issue was that the flying dragon used by the academy was not an original design, but a generic design that has been propagated widely on the internet and used by other companies. I offered around twenty or more various designs and mascots before we all agreed that an 'S' shaped dragon would serve the academy best. Such a design would maintain continuity between old and new and my task was to find a way to make the dragon a little more unique. The result you can see below.

 

You don't know how long it took me to tame the bezier curves I used to create the curving dragon shapes on Adobe Illustrator!! I'm pretty pleased with the result and very honoured to have been asked by such a well-known academy. The logo will be used on all their academy apparel as well as on digital and print media.

My final design for today is a logo I made for Parra Academy in Texas. This family school (father and son are both instructors) offers a wide number of martial arts disciplines, from JKD, to Muay Thai to BJJ. Jeff, the BJJ instructor simply asked me to come up with a crazed mascot for his BJJ division and I sketched a variety of bats, imps and other critters. We finally settled on an octopus performing a rear naked choke on his hapless victim. The octopus symbolises both the mutli-disciplinary nature of the school and the multi-limbed and flexible nature of BJJ itself. A perfect jiu jitsu animal!!

By the way, if you haven't joined my Meerkatsu page on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/Meerkatsu), then I offer more content, previews, exclusive give aways, discount codes, contests, design talk, fightwear talk, heck, just talk in general. It's like the blog, but so much more! So go click 'like' pleasey pleasey. Thanks!

:)