BSA-LHC-FOS-CSP MineCraft Patch

Intro:
My local Boy Scout Council wanted a Minecraft inspired Council Strip for the Friends of Scouting promotion. With the theme "Building Leaders... One adventure at a Time. Initially they wanted to do a Lego based design but couldn't get Lego licensing approval. So they went with a generic Minecraft theme look.

I’ve played Minecraft off and on before, but to be honest it was back when it was first taking off. Not since its most recently surge in popularity. I did some quick online research to refresh my memory on the look of the land as it where, to come up with a design to emulate the look of Minecraft without it being actual Minecraft. I gathered a few reference examples.

I started out doing penciled drafts for a rough design (pictured was the best choice). My first thought was to flesh this out digitally using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or other various softwares. But when I actually started trying to draw it using vector based and even pixel base programs I quickly realized that the easiest way to produce this would be to use my 3D source program Tinkercad.

Starting off as small as I could geometrically, since Minecraft is Cubular, putting cubes together and assembling, stacking, duplicating slowly to create a 3 Dimensional version of the BSA and Fluer De Li. Once I had this I then began adding background elements to in the MineCraft color scheme to emulate my pencil draft.

Once I had final model, I started playing with angles and views for how to best display to represent the design into the actual Council Strip shape. BSA Council strips typically are set dimension of 5” x 2”. But just by searching the internet for Council Strips you’ll see it seems more of a suggestion than a rule. However National has been pushing for this size to be more of a rule. At any rate I finally got the finished view I was happy with.

With the art in position, I spec’d the dimension, spec’d thread colors, and pertinent information for Council and patch company. Typically patch companies allow 9 actual thread colors in patch designs, with additional costs for added threads. Another option is doing an image print with threads over. My initial fear was there would be too many colors with my design to make the patch affordable. So I recommended the image option.

The Awesome patch company was initially in agreement with my recommendation. But after some thread engineering, and by running threads in different directions they were able to achieve a similar look for the design and produce a full coverage thread patch design. The Council and myself were all very pleased with the finished result.

I’ve been doing patch designs for my local council and other councils across the country for 30 plus years.

If anyone has any questions regarding the process I’ll be happy to answer them.