Oh my days, this one took me so long to come up with an idea.
If you’ve been following along with the first three blogs, you’ll know that this zodiac collection is all about creating feminine goddess imagery to represent the signs. I spent a long time focusing on the moon for this one, but I think it really needed to have the crab. (My sister is also a cancerian and basically was like, no crab, no cancer).
Cancer feels like one of the more emotionally loaded signs, so I think I put quite a lot of pressure on myself to get this one “right,” which probably didn’t help the process.
I was really struggling with how to make this feminine, and also, as a side note, I have a ridiculous problem with spiders, and this is a bit too close to that whole spectrum for me, so I really didn’t want to draw it.
Things got so bad I was chatting it through with some friends, and one suggested I draw a Barbie-esque woman with crabs crawling out of her pants, and I was literally starting to consider it!! That was definitely a low point in the ideation process, but also quite funny looking back on it.
Anyway, I can’t remember how the idea of a crab-shaped uterus came to me... maybe in a dream, who knows, but it appeared! The claws here are full of star “eggs,” and we’ve even got some moving down the fallopian tubes and embedding into the lining of the uterine wall, which are positioned to reflect the Cancer constellation.
We also obviously have the Cancer glyph here, and there’s lots of symbolism around the number four because it’s the fourth sign of the zodiac such as four-pointed stars, groupings of four, four lines, etc.
The whole design is set inside an upside down triangle (water element symbol). Plus the water element is also represented here as the four wavy lines, which also represent the vagina. Really committed to the anatomy here. Another interesting use of my Human Anatomy degree. True story.
This one was definitely a bit of a battle to get going, but once that spark of inspiration came I absolutely loved creating it. It's defintely one of my favourites in the collection. I also love the kind of retro pastel 80s vibe it has going!
This one (and Leo) are quite unique compared to the rest of the collection in the fact they were primarily created online with smooth digitally created lines and shapes. Not at all what I intended for this collection but I'm so happy with the final outcome. There is also lots of negative space for the natural base of the t-shirt to come through.
It’s available now on a raw cotton t-shirts base, which really suits the colour palette.
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