How To Design An Illustrated Scarf

Hello My TWD Darlings,

I hope you all had a fantastic weekend and great start to your week! I for one had a pretty stellar weekend involving an uber fun filled roadtrip to Toronto for a dear friend's wedding on Saturday (more on that to come!!). I'm finally bouncing back from the whirlwind of nearly 24 hrs spent in a car in 2.5 days lol. Regardless, today I'm riding high on life because I discovered that the illustrated scarf I designed for Collection 18 has finally become available to buy on NORDSTROM EEEeeeee!! Yes I'm totally squealing over this.

I VERY rarely show any of the work I do for my employer here. But I thought it could be really interesting for you, my sweet Travel Write Draw inner circle, to show the behind the scenes of making the scarf and also break down a comprehensive (and very much abbreviated) how to that you can use when considering designing a scarf yourself. SO it starts a little something like this.

STEP 1: Decide on your theme! When we were considering our trends almost a year ago now we were seeing lots of evidence of flamingos everywhere from fashion accessories to home goods. It became clear that this wasn't a trend to be ignored. So we agreed to move forward with an engineered scarf design involving a flamingo and I got straight to work on pulling references to draw from.


STEP 2: Illustrate your motifs! Once I gathered the very best the web had to offer on flamingos I whipped out the finest watercolor paper and got to work. I painted and painted, and then I painted some more, until I got just the right angle of the flamingo to work with in photoshop. I scanned the best illustrations, cleaned them and moved onto...

STEP 3: Playing with compositions! With my scanned flamingos I started placing them into a file in the dimensions of the scarf I wanted to create - in this case 26" x 80". I illustrated a few geometric shapes to create a print for the background of the scarf. This was the really experimental stage where I created roughly 40 different layouts to be considered for one final scarf design.

STEP 4: Pitch the colors! We decided unanimously to use the scarf where the flamingos head and body draped around your neck when wearing as a true wrap. But this wasn't the end of it. I printed the scarf life size and started pitching the pantone colors so the maker would know how to get as exact as possible. This also allowed for limiting the number of screens it took to print the design.

STEP 5: Send to maker! Once the pitch sheet was filled out with all the colors and their positions on the scarf, I burned the final design to a disc, folded the life size printout, and threw the design sheet in an envelope to be sent to our makers. Within weeks we received our first sample which was probably my most rewarding day ever at Collection 18!!

STEP 6: Sell to buyer! Once you have your sample, you're ready to sell! In our case, the sample goes in the showroom in time for August market to be viewed by all the retail buyers. For you at home receiving a sample means you can confirm that it is accurate and also photograph for your online store. I'm beyond thrilled that of all the retailers to walk through our showroom last Summer, NORDSTROM was the one who purchased my design!!

And now you can view it on shop.nordstrom.com here:

Did you find this post helpful? Are there projects that I've worked on that you would like to see more how to's or behind the scenes on? If so let me know in the comment section below.

Much love,
Meag xx