Jono Sandilands: Football Scout & The Festival of Football Ideas

Physicality, determination, awareness, creativity, aggression.

Football Player Scouts evaluate the talents of footballers with the aim to sign new players to a club.
Boy & Girl Scouts collect merit badges to demonstrate their achievements in various pursuits and activities.

These metaphorical merit badges are collected by football players to show off their skills and technical attributes.

… or you can buy them and sew them onto your jacket!

Football Scout is also a 3 colour screenprint for the Miniature Print exhibition at The Festival of Football Ideas, Bristol

The Festival of Football Ideas explores football art, literature, music, comedy and much much more, and runs from May 30 – June 14, 2014. There is loads of events for everyone – you don’t have to like football!

The print is on show with 32 other amazing artists at the festival venue (which happens to be a big silver football! see!) and also at the Beatroot cafe on Lower Park Row, Bristol.

Process

As always, the best place to start is the sketch book. You can see a few ideas forming on the pages below, including football scout and bacteria football which I would love to do sometime.

The lists helped to figure out the final badges to bring forward to artwork and produce from all the possible choices. I suppose this also shows the set could be expandable in future.

Digital embroidery

Inspired by embroidered football club emblems and scout merit badges – I originally wanted to make my submission for the Festival of Football Ideas as the embroidered versions, however there was not enough time left for me to do this due to how busy the facilities were at the art school, but I booked in and started teaching myself the embroidery software which is Wilcom EmbroideryStudio e3.

The software was a bit tricky to begin with, having already started digitising the badges in Illustrator, trying to work between the two programmes was a bit of a waste of time. After spending a bit of time doing some tests, playing around with the different tools and redrawing artwork, things started to speed up and the symbols were all looking really good. The text was the next issue…

I wanted the badges to remain very small, all are between 30-40mm. At this size the text is unreadable because it is impossible to stitch – so it will work better to only embroider the symbols – was worth a test to see how far it can be pushed.

Sample testing different methods for stitching the text at a small font size: