Banner Babes
3 Vector Illustrations of Girls Playing Team Sports
Last week was a very busy week indeed. Whilst juggling a campaign for Sainsbury’s and a website for an IT Software provider, I spent some time working on three vector illustrations for a client. The brief was simple, work from hand drawn sketches to develop three silhouette images of sexy, confident girls dressed in their kits and ready for a game of their favourite team sports.
These are no ordinary sporty ladies though, they’re the Banner Babes from County Clare, Ireland… and they prefer to play in stilettos. There’s the Football babe, Hurling Babe, and Rugby babe each representing the female sporting fans from County Clare.
The Banner Babes were created for female sports fans who are tired of wearing over-sized sports shirts at football, hurling and rugby matches to support their teams. And the Babes are now ready to be printed in a variety of team colours onto fitted ladies T-shirts.
County Clare, Ireland
County Clare is in the West of Ireland and is often referred to as the Banner County. The custom of carrying banners goes back a long way in County Clare, possibly as far back as the battles of Clontarf (1014) and Fontenoy (1745) and it’s certain that the Clare Regiments carried banners in the many battles they fought on the continent during the eighteenth century.
The tradition of displaying banners continued throughout the nineteenth century with tradesman using them to identify their tradesmanship, from bakers and butchers to brogue makers and stone masons. At the inauguration of the O’Connell monument in Ennis in 1865 thirteen different guilds carried banners, each representing the attributes of their particular trade. There’s no doubt that this was a long tradition in County Clare since on that occasion, the brogue makers’ guild carried a flag that had first been unfurled in 1726.
So flags and banners have been quite a tradition in Clare, and it draws a parallel with supporting team sports today. Crowds of fans wearing the team colours, waving the flags and cheering on their favourite teams. So it looks like the Banner Babes are here to carry on the old tradition originating in County Clare, and hopefully they’ll be able to see their own banners catching on with fans in other parts of the country.
Banner Babes
10 Steps to Creating Vector Illustrations from Hand Drawn Sketches
The Banner Babes were drawn in Illustrator starting out with hand drawn sketches. The following is a brief explanation on how to create vector illustrations from a sketch:
1. First of all create pencil sketches of the item you want to illustrate
2. Using Google images can be useful to refer to similar pictures in order to help visualise the drawings
3. Work on your sketch to ensure you have sufficient detail ensuring you make any required adjustments
4. Once happy with your pencil sketch, create an outline drawing using a black fine liner
5. Scan your drawing and save as a jpeg file
6. Using Adobe Illustrator, create a new file and then used File>Place to select the suitable drawing
7. Place the jpg file on a locked layer with a transparency setting of 50%
8. Create a new layer and use the pen tool to draw over your original sketch in a 1pixel black stroke with no fill
9. Once the images are traced, you may need to make a series of adjustments to improve elements of the vector illustration such as working in detail and tweaking body proportions
10. Once this is finished the vector illustrations can be modified in Illustrator or Photoshop and used for artwork, T-shirts or Logos
