Making a Palm Tree Icon from Scratch

Sometimes clients want the same elements over and over again, which is when it's a good idea to make your own icon pieces. Living in Southern California, the palm tree and the sun are a favorite theme.

I started by sketching whatever came to mind over several days.

This one is my favorite, but it also feels awfully familiar. Anybody else recognize it?

This laid a good foundation for the next step, which is to refine the main concepts into some real options. The Aztec suns were way too angry and scary, but I still had some solid ideas that I could expand on. I decided to focus on the palm.

This is the first step, a detailed trace of an actual palm.

Then I doodled some more.

Scratch pages and random mid-project doodles can show options, test theories, and clear my head of tired, trite clutter that's taking up important space. As you can see, by the end of the second page I'd pretty much run out of gas, but I had some good direction for the next day, when I started to pull everything together.

As you can see, my sketches got uglier and uglier, but also simpler and simpler.

Eventually this:

Became this:

A printer friendly palm tree that can be used for any kind of merchandise at almost any size or resolution.