Scarf Designs

'Sanctus Strix' are a range of scarf designs focusing upon Owls, which have been considered a bad omen and a symbol of death throughout art history, and intricate patterns inspired by religious Medieval art. The designs echo repeated themes of my project, such as dot work, gilding and halos.
When initially conceiving the designs, I decided that I wanted the designs to be connected to my elaborate repeat designs, however they are not intended to be worn together as the scarves are large, bold statement pieces.
The designs feature a Barn Owl, as ever expressing my long running obsession with Barn Owls, and a Long Eared Owl, which I find incredibly beautiful, yet sinister and menacing, which I felt was rather fitting due to the symbolism of the imagery.

Now the designs are complete, I intend to screen print them onto silk using a variety of techniques and processes.

Sin Repeat

After compleating my 'Virtue' repeat design I began intensive work on also putting 'Sin' into repeat and manipulating it digitally to ensure that the design is perfect. The final repeat can be seen below. I decided that the design should be simpler than Virtue to create a range of different levels of complexity across my collection, and because I intend to work onto the digital print using metallic powder.

Virtue Repeat

After cleaning the high resolution scan of 'Virtue' and resolving any errors, the next step was to put the design into a prefect repeat unit. This was achieved using the 'Offset' tool in Photoshop. Once in repeat, the background of the design was removed, meaning that the colour, texture and pattern behind 'Virtue' was easily interchangeable. I experimented with painting watercolour sheets and placing those into repeat, to act as a background and add subtle texture to the design, preventing it from becoming flat. The results can be seen below:

'Sin'

Another design which I have been working on, and acts as the opposing design to 'Virtue' is 'Sin'. Naturally I chose to echo specific aesthetic aspects within both designs to unify the collection, such as halos and dotwork, as well as scale. In order to reflect the more sinister subversive message of the design I decided to design the halos black with gold dots, as a twist on the more tradiotional approach. Halos are a fascinating aspect of ecclesiastical art, as they change and develop through time periods, and different artists have very varied approaches to the halo (my personal favourite being Fra Angelico and his many different visual interpretations of the halo).

'Virtue' progress

As my 'Virtue' repeat is an A1 design It has required extensive photoshop manipulation post-scanning to piece together each section of the design and retain its high quality. The design is now 'pixel perfect' and ready to be put into repeat and move onto the next stage of editing; adding a background.