There is a moment, when you are building a shadowbox or a frame piece, when you choose the velvet — and everything changes.
Not the specimen. Not the frame. The velvet.
I have been making gothic art for long enough to know that the velvet is not a background. It is not a neutral surface that holds the other elements in place. It is an active participant in the piece — it sets the emotional register, it tells you what kind of darkness you are looking at, it determines whether the piece feels like a reliquary or a ritual, a funeral or a love story.
This is something I think about every time I start a new piece. And I want to try to explain it, because I think it matters more than most people realise.
What velvet actually does
Velvet absorbs light. That is the technical fact, and it is also the emotional one.
Most materials reflect. Glass reflects. Bone reflects. Metal reflects. Even dried flowers have a surface that catches the light and gives something back. Velvet takes the light in and keeps it. It creates depth without distance — you look at velvet and you feel like you are looking into something, not at something. It makes the objects placed against it appear to float, to be suspended in a space that has no clear back wall.
This is why velvet has been used in reliquaries and display cases and jewellery boxes for centuries. It is not decorative. It is functional. It makes the thing inside it look more important, more precious, more set apart from the ordinary world.
In gothic art, that quality becomes something else entirely. Because the objects I work with — skulls, specimens, bones, dried flowers, obsidian — are already set apart. They already carry weight. The velvet does not just elevate them. It changes what they mean.
Crimson: the colour of ritual
Red velvet is the most immediately legible. Everyone understands, on some level, what red means — blood, passion, danger, the sacred and the profane occupying the same space.
Crimson Ritual is a gothic wall relic built around a real bat skull, framed with hand-cast wings, set against deep crimson crushed velvet. The velvet here is not a backdrop — it is the altar cloth. It is the surface on which the ritual happens. The pentagram, the wax rose, the ornamental skulls — all of it reads differently against crimson than it would against any other colour. The red makes the piece feel active. Something is happening, or has just happened, or is about to. It is the colour of the moment before.
Deep red and burgundy: love that cannot be undone
There is a difference between crimson and burgundy, and it matters.
Crimson is immediate. Burgundy is old. It is the colour of wine left too long, of roses past their peak, of love that has had time to become something more complicated than it started as.
Crimson Throne carries that weight precisely. A real preserved scorpion — Heterometrus laoticus — presides over deep crimson velvet, sealed behind hand-cut glass in a baroque frame with aged gold detailing. A miniature brass nameplate, a preserved rose, a small skull. The velvet is what makes the scorpion feel like a relic rather than a specimen. It is the devotion. The scorpion is the venom. You cannot have one without the other, and the piece would not work if you tried to separate them.
Deep purple: the colour of the long walk home
Purple velvet is the most witchy of the colours I work with, and I mean that as a precise description rather than a vague one.
It is the colour of the hour just before dark — not night, not day, but the threshold between them. It is the colour of amethyst and of the inside of old churches and of the kind of magic that is comfortable rather than alarming. When I use deep purple velvet, I am making a piece that belongs to someone who has been doing this for a long time and finds it rather pleasant.
Lunaris Divination is built on royal purple velvet — a real mink skull, halved and symmetrically arranged, flanked by pentacle charms and a crystal quartz crescent moon. The symmetry is deliberate. The purple is deliberate. It says: this is a ritual space, but a comfortable one. This is not a place to be afraid of. This is a place to come home to.
Navy: the sacred and the funereal
Navy velvet is the colour I reach for when a piece needs to feel ecclesiastical. Not religious, exactly — but cathedral-dark. The colour of the sky at the moment just before it decides to be night. The colour of stained glass from the inside.
In Lacrimosa — a preserved Ghost Cicada crowned with a silver lace cross, surrounded by dried white flowers, against deep navy velvet — the navy is what makes the piece feel like a requiem. The cicada is already extraordinary: pale, translucent wings veined in gold, one of the most ethereal insects in existence. But against navy velvet, it becomes a relic. It becomes something that belongs in a reliquary in a church that has been closed for a century. The navy holds the silence.
Floral Delight uses the same navy — deep, rich, funereal — for a piece that is simultaneously dark and unexpectedly tender. A preserved bat specimen surrounded by real bone ribs and deep pink preserved flowers, with a mummified bat skull resting nearby. The navy velvet is what holds the contradiction together. It gives the flowers their gravity and the bones their softness. Without it, the piece would pull apart. With it, it becomes a single, coherent thing — decay and bloom, held in the same breath.
The velvet is never neutral
I want to be clear about this, because I think it is the thing that matters most: there is no neutral velvet choice. Every colour is a decision about what the piece means, what emotional register it operates in, what kind of darkness it is made of.
Black velvet is the most obvious choice for gothic art, and I use it — but I use it carefully, because black velvet can flatten a piece. It can make everything look the same kind of dark, the same kind of serious. The other colours — the crimsons and navies and purples and burgundies — are what allow me to make pieces that feel different from each other, that have different emotional temperatures, that tell different kinds of stories.
When someone asks me why a piece feels the way it does — why one shadowbox feels like a ritual and another feels like a love story and another feels like a funeral hymn — the answer is almost always, at least in part: the velvet.
It is the first thing I choose. It is the thing that tells me what the piece wants to be.
