Party over here, party over there, wave your hands in the air, Party Camels! Whoomp, there it is! Wait...what is a Party Camel, you ask? Apparently, it is the name of a First Lego League team, and what is First Lego League? I'd summarize it thusly: an expertly crafted con job to get kids into STEM by bait-and-switching (1) playing with Lego robots with (2) good old fashioned coding along with scientific research. Obviously, the bait-and-switch is necessary because no 10 year old is willingly signing up for the later half of that deal. Anyway, Will got sucked into one such club, and at some point the gaggle of 10 year olds decided to call themselves the Party Camels, much to the chagrin of the two Moms who coach this volatile crew.
So, where do I come in? Well, a few weeks back I was asked by one of the coaches (my wife), to create a t-shirt design for these Party Camels. Immediately my mind went to the full-bodied flavor of Joe Camel, shooting pool and horking a smoke. Party on you smooth character...
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| Sorry, Joe, no young minds for you to corrupt here... |
Apparently, regurgitating late 80s Joe Camel ads is frowned on in the realm of First Lego League, so I turned to the ancient art of drawing to solve this problem. My art direction from Will consisted of these main points:
- There must be a camel who appears to be partying
- The camel must have a party hat on
- The camel must be blowing on a party horn
- The shirt design must say "Party Camels"
And I added in:
- Try to avoid regurgitating Joe Camel cigarette ads permanently ingrained in my brain from my misspent youth (see above!)
Here are a few of the various sketches, concepts, and chicken-scratch:
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| First page of sketches |
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| Trying out a more raised chin and closing his eyes to make him happily partying |
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| Taking the head from sketch two and the ideas from sketch one lands us here, close to the final design, albeit very rough |
Rather than crafting a real-world finished pencil drawing, I hopped into Clip Studio and did my pencils there. Here are the fairly tight digital pencils and the ink:
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| Digital pencils |
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| Digital ink |
The next step was hoping over to Adobe Illustrator and doing an image trace on the line work, fiddling with text, adding some various shapes, the usual graphic designy stuff.
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| Black and white design from Illustrator |
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| Color design from Illustrator |
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| Color design ready for production and uploaded to Custom Ink |
Now it was time to sit back and bask in the adulation of the Party Camels crew for my awesome design. However, unbeknownst to me, while I toiled for untold minutes on said design, those crafty Party Camels were concocting their own mascot out of Lego Technic:
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| A real world Lego party camel! |
The team then created their own shirt design and put it up for a vote against old-man Owen's antiquated work-flow. In a turn of events that in no way foreshadows my future in software development, my design wound-up losing to a AI generated design made by a 10 year old using the above image as a source.
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| Gah! You won this round ChatGPT! |
I'm sure there is some moral to this story, but I choose not to see it and bury my head in the sand concerning the upcoming AI apocalypse.
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| Until next time!!! |
Owen Soule
Published November 4, 2025
