500-Year-Old Symbols, Reimagined: The Story Behind My Favorite Print

500-Year-Old Symbols, Reimagined: The Story Behind My Favorite Print

There is nothing new about hiding a story inside an image.

Before there were words on walls, there were symbols. A lion on a shield. A falcon on a crest. A rainbow in a queen's hand. Human beings have always understood that a single visual, loaded with the right meaning, could carry what language alone couldn't — identity, power, loyalty, grief. All of it compressed into one image that anyone who knew how to look could read.

That instinct is exactly what surface pattern design is built on. And it's exactly what drove the making of The Elizabeth.

How the Research Actually Works

I've been a student of the Tudor era my whole life — through fiction, through film, through art history. But the process of making a print like this isn't passive fandom. It's forensic.

It starts with looking. Really looking. Not at the painting as a whole, but at every object in it, every detail of dress, every symbol placed deliberately by a court that understood image as political currency. Tudor portraiture wasn't documentation — it was propaganda. Everything meant something.

My family and I visited Hampton Court Palace in person, and that changed everything. The symbolic language isn't confined to canvas — it's carved into ceilings, woven into textiles, repeated across stone and wood until the symbols become inescapable. From there the research goes wide: art history, museum archives, heraldry, Wikipedia rabbit holes at midnight. I build a visual library. Then I sketch. And the sketching is where research stops being research and starts becoming something else.

The Elizabeth

The print begins with the Rainbow Portrait — one of the most enduring images of Elizabeth I, painted when she was nearly 70. She is shown as a ravishing, ageless beauty, her dress covered in eyes and ears. She sees everything. She hears everything. On her sleeve, an embroidered serpent: wisdom, the quality with which she navigated a reign full of treacherous politics and impossible expectations.

In her right hand she holds a rainbow. Beside it: Non Sine Sole Iris. No rainbow without a sun. Elizabeth is England's sun. The rainbow exists because she does.

The pigment used to paint that rainbow didn't survive the centuries. What remains in the original today is a dull brown band — the promise, faded.

In this print, it's back. Brights.

From there I layered in the broader heraldic language of the collection: the Tudor rose, a crown, the phoenix — Elizabeth's own symbol, the creature that rises from its own ashes, chosen by a woman who was the daughter of Anne Boleyn. I drew the Boleyn falcon. I drew Anne's pearl necklace with the A, the signature piece she wore to her death, carried now into a print made in her daughter's honor.

And I sketched the Chequers Ring — a mother-of-pearl and ruby locket ring that Elizabeth wore every day of her reign, reportedly taken from her finger the moment she died. Open it, and there are two portraits inside: one of Elizabeth, and one believed to be Anne Boleyn. A queen who almost never spoke her mother's name, keeping her hidden and close, for forty-five years.

The eyes and ears see everything. The serpent holds its wisdom. The rainbow burns bright again. And somewhere in the repeat, a daughter carries her mother in secret.

Surrounding all of it — pansies. Because they're pretty. That's enough of a reason.

Tudor & Ash is coming in July. There's so much more to tell.