The Boom Operator career field has been around since 1948. When the Boom Operator first came into the USAF, there was a patch made for booms with a tiger on it. Ever since then the tiger has been the resemblance of the Boom. I have been in for a little over 10 years and can say that the tiger patch has fallen to the wayside. This is where my inspiration of the tiger comes from. He is to resemble the heritage of the Boom Operator. Since I have been in, Booms have always been considered a “mafia” because of how close-knit and tight the overall group is. It did not matter if you were on the job day one or been in for 100 years, you were accepted into the group. I took this idea and attempted to merge it with the tiger. The shield that it is designed on is a play off the current Boom patch that we wear today.

Starting the design, I uploaded a picture of my sketch into Illustrator. Here I used the brush blob to trace the outline of my sketch and was able to copy and paste onto an artboard. Using the live bucket tool, I was able to fill all the colors and slightly adjust the thickness of my sketch. I realized the further I got into using illustrator that it is not an easy program without extensive knowledge. I found Photoshop to be much easier to use and much easier to customize. Every time I tried adjusting certain paths, I would either get errors or it would not adjust the way I wanted. I did not get to accomplish what I wanted with this design out of pure frustration.

The changes I made from my previous design were fairly drastic. The most common comment I got on my first draft was that the tiger did not look like a tiger. With this advice I needed almost start from scratch. I also attempted to go with a more simple text design and base. I hope in the future I can go back and accomplish what I wanted out of this design.