Meet Sock the Sockeye, the charming mascot for the T1 TimeStream project. Sock serves as a friendly guide, greeting users and enriching their journey with tutorials and historical insights into Vancouver, Washington. Inspired by the abundant wildlife of the Pacific Northwest and the resilient salmon that annually navigate our local rivers, Sock was designed to resonate with the regional identity. My role involved transforming initial concept art and character poses into these finished, rendered illustrations. The goal was to create a design that was cartoonish yet distinct—avoiding stereotypical fish mascots—resulting in an endearing character that perfectly embodies the spirit of the augmented reality experience.
Bringing Sock to life required a blend of digital tools and artistic refinement. I began by sketching the character's forms in Procreate, but the project necessitated the illustrations be scalable vector graphics (SVG) for web integration. To meet this technical requirement, I brought the rasterized (PNG) sketches into Adobe Illustrator. While an initial image trace provided a starting point, achieving professional quality demanded meticulous post-processing; I manually refined countless lines and corrected color gradients. This process of leveraging multiple techniques—from initial sketch to final vector polished in industry-standard software like Procreate and Adobe Illustrator—allowed me to elevate a rough concept into a polished, final asset where the results speak for themselves.