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MÉL THE SEAL — Remote Work Solutions for Tired Creative People
Meet Mel: a sleepy harbor seal built from lavender raff, client revisions, lofi beats, low battery mode, and tiny wins.
What started as a small painting of a seal with cosmic eyes became a full mascot-led brand world. I developed Mel’s personality, origin story, visual identity, comic series, emotional language, packaging, merch, stickers, social content, and a card game for freelancers surviving the workday.
The goal was to create more than a cute mascot. Mel needed to feel like the same character everywhere: in a comic panel, on a coffee cup, inside a sticker pack, on a hoodie, and in a tiny animated moment of client-revision panic.
Built with Recraft Studio:
Character exploration, reference-image workflows, V4.1 Vector identity studies, packaging and merchandise applications, social assets, storyboards, and image-to-video experiments.
Always tired. Often late. Still shows up.
Full Case Study: https://www.recraft.ai/project/2a11d3ab-1851-4c5e-b259-3e3a54b46633
My loom is in the comments.
loom here
And more seals (South Africa). 😁🦭
This character represents my turbulent introvert soul!!!I like it very much!!!Are you planning to make it as a telegram sticker? If yes, I'm willing to buy it!
Thanks a lot. I’ll get to it this evening—I’ve been meaning to do it. I’ll send you the link.
Stickers ready =) https://t.me/addstickers/MelTheSeal - Free 🦭
Thank you @Kris Anfalova !!! I would also love to get in touch with you.
Woww! Great Work. I love it
Thank you!
Great consistency across the touchpoints. The comic, merch, packaging, and emotional language all feel like they belong to the same character. Good luck
Was all of this made by AI? Or did you actually create the painting?
Everything except the seal painting on canvas in the case was made by AI
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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