This is part of a series of “behind the scenes” posts about my Sunday & Seurat designs for the Guthrie Store. Click here to see all of the posts in this series or see a gallery of the collection.
Another iconic shape in the Sunday on the Isle painting is parasols. There are many people sitting and standing in the scene holding a parasol. I liked this one where you could see the contrasting color on the inside, so I decided to make one like that. 
My original paper design for this one was very much larger than the finished design. Making it larger was just an easy way to make sure that it had all of the detail I wanted with shapes and shadows added with colored pencil. It’s much easier to cut something out with scissors than it is to have to make tiny things with an exacto knife. It was easy to re-scale it after I had scanned it. I was designing this specifically for bow ties, so I wanted something simple that would make sense when it was scaled down to bow tie size.
Parasols. Fabric detail.
I kept the bright turquoise blue of the original and recolored another one to be almost the same deeper blue as the one in the painting. Lots of people wear blue, black or grey and I thought this made a print that would look nice with any of those. I created a geometric pattern by alternating them, which I also thought for a bow tie would give a print that was super wearable, while still being a little fun and quirky when you looked at it closely. This design was also built up of layers of pointillist-style dots and transparent colors.
