Crows are one of the most intelligent birds, able to recognise people, use tools, and understand patterns. Despite, or perhaps because of this, they have long suffered negative associations, being regarded as a symbol of bad luck by the Ancient Greeks, and more recently being connected to witchcraft and death.
Concept
Corvid references a different aspect of crow behaviour: their reputation for collecting shiny trinkets. Placing crow motifs on something so entwined in the ritual of gift-giving – wrapping paper – offers a gently subversive commentary on materialistic culture.
Design
I sketched, from photographs, crows in several poses, converting the sketches to a vector format and experimenting with different levels of detail. I settled on a simple, two-tone block colour style: just enough detail to convey the idea of what each crow was up to. Initially, I arranged these sketches across a background in a random distribution, but the combination of the different poses and the layout gave too messy an overall impression. I switched to a diamond grid layout, balancing order and variation.
