I am an unapologetic lover of all things space; rockets in particular. I’ve always loved looking at mission patches. If you ever go down to Kennedy Space Center, the gift shop has a wall of them. Coins, cloth patches, iron on, sew on, etc. It’s really amazing to look at some of the thoughtfulness that goes into them. I decided to take a stab at making a fictional one. This was shooting from the hip and wasn’t prefaced with any drawings apart from a circle… and nothing else.
I wanted to experiment without the confines of “this is what it looks like”. For the next one I will do a sketch first, then a mockup and then polish it off. I added some relief to the patch as it looked too clean. These things are sewn onto suits or jackets and are meant to look a little worn.
Everything you see is drawn in Illustrator. The relief was done in Photoshop. The Earth was traced and then I cleaned up the lines to look less janky. The rocket itself is loosely based on the same rocket that launched the Voyager spacecraft back in the late 70s, the Titan IIIE. A couple of other notes. I fooled with colors back and forth. Green was going to go in but it looked way less “spacey”. The premise of Earth is that it is a “blue planet”, so blue stuck around. I had originally drawn Saturn to go onto the rocket but I opted to keep it close by in our immediate celestial neighborhood.
Without further ado the completely made up mission patch that promotes the 24/7/365 views of Earth. I want to note that the “/” looked terrible so I used bullets. EDIT: The original is shown top left. This is one that I embellished a bit in photoshop.
