Break the Pattern

It started with a song line about breaking the pattern, or the loop repeats tomorrow. The brief was open: design something that mimics that behaviour. The parable of the snake and the saw fit. A snake crawls over a saw and gets cut. Instead of taking the loss and moving on, it reacts blindly and wraps itself around the blade until it kills itself. The blade doesn't care. The only one who cared was the snake, and that was its undoing.

Every design starts with the face, because the emotion matters most and everything else follows from it. The dagger's face came quickly: taunting, with a big mouth and wild eyes. The snake needed to be angry, but its position was still open, so this page tries a few.

With the dagger mapped out, which came easily, the hard part was the angle of the snake and how it wraps around the blade.

The snake's face goes through a few versions at different angles to see what works best.

The face in the upper left won. It made better eye contact with the dagger and showed more of the cobra's profile.

Next the wrapping is cleaned up and the snake's face is fitted onto a body. The rest of the design was already close to done, so the snake's body was the hardest part.

The cleaned-up sketch is inked with the Studio Pen brush. It leaves very clean paths with no jagged edges, which makes colour dropping easier and suits DTF printing, which needs clean line work. Blurry edges don't translate well to a print.

This is a test, not the finished colours. The design has two big colourful pieces, the dagger and the snake, and balancing them took some work. Procreate's complementary palette tool helped: put in a colour and it suggests its complement. The dagger had red eyes and a gold tooth from early on, like a villain with a gold tooth.

In the end the dagger went yellow, which makes it read as a classic dagger at a glance. The snake went green, a more realistic choice, and shading makes the colours pop.

Every print is hand-pressed in-house onto the garment you're holding.