Pond Scum Swim Club

Notes on the design:

Digital illustration done in Procreate with various ink pen and gouache brushes.

This is the start of a personal project to launch a new, just-for-fun "swim club" for family and friends. The name comes from a famous family swim outing in an infamously mucky swimming hole (described further below.)

I started the project with this illustration concept and decided I like the art direction enough to use as the branding. The idea was inspired by old Swamp Thing movie posters and comics. I had a vision of an open water swimmer seen from overhead to show them cutting a wake through the muck and becoming so coated in scum they're no longer identifiably human... maybe a new origin story??

With the overall design I wanted to convey the swirls and wake of the swimmer, with layers of muck and algae as it often looks when you break through the surface. I decided to work entirely in green to really emphasize the prolific algae, vegetation and pond organisms. I experimented with layering textures and colors to create the depth, texture, and organic shapes in the scummy water. The bright, chartreuse green really accentuates the algae which is the core message of the story. It also adds a nice depth effect to depict the parts of the swimmer breaking the surface while the body is shaded just underneath.

I started playing around hand-lettering the gloopy font for the name and decided to use it to fill the remaining space. This allowed me to be loose and playful with the size, shape, and orientation of the letters. It emphasizes the organic style of the piece, and even got to use lily-pad shapes for the counters. The end result is more of a 'poster design' than just the figurative illustration alone.

The story behind the piece:

I grew up on a farm with a small pond, which for many years would become so encased in a thick layer of algae that it made swimming a no-go for all but the most brave kids. A couple summers ago during a family reunion, with now-grown siblings, cousins, and the next generation of outdoors kids, we all decided a cool dip was just too tempting on a hot summer day. One by one we cannon-balled through the muck and spent the rest of the afternoon swimming, floating, and playing that beautiful green-brown water full of mud and life.

We had so much fun we decided this had to be a recurring event and the Pond Scum Swim Club was born.