School Leavers Hoodie Design
5 years, 5 completely different designs
Every summer, I get to do something that genuinely fills me up as an illustrator.
My local primary school has been coming back to me for five years now, and every year it is the same wonderful process: the Year 6 children sit down with pencils, paper, their imaginations, and they draw.
Characters, memories, inside jokes, places, things that matter to them as a class.
Then all of those drawings land with me, and my job is to find the thread that runs through all of them and weave it into a single, unified design that belongs to that group of children, in that year, in that school.
How it works
Every child's contribution matters.
That's not something I say to be nice, it is genuinely how the design takes shape. I go through everything the class has submitted: the careful drawings, the doodles, the things they are proud of and the things they have scribbled quickly because they were not sure if it was good enough.
All of it is good enough. All of it tells me a little story.
From all of that, I sketch and refine until something cohesive emerges. A design that has its own logic and its own life, but that any child in that class could look at and find a piece of themselves in. The humour. The shared references. The things that made that particular Year 6 who they were.
No two years are the same.
No two designs look alike, because no two classes are alike. One year it might be Gary the seagull surfing an epic wave. The next it might be something completely different that I could never have predicted before I saw what the children gave me and that is exactly what makes this worth doing!
The finished design is something I hope the children will keep for a long time, a little snapshot of their year, their class and the things that made it theirs.
2022 - 2025 Designs
Every year brings a new class, a new collection of ideas, and a completely new story to illustrate.
I can't wait to see what next year's children come up with!