“Unkindness” Illustrated

The Raven Café t-shirts feature collective nouns that are used when describing a group of ravens. There are four:

• a “constable”
• a “conspiracy”
• a “storytelling”
• an “unkindness”

They change depending on the the group of ravens’ activities. In the four years Sadaat and I have owned the Raven Cafe I’ve designed and redesigned them depending on how successful I perceive them to be.

The previous “unkindness” design sold well, but I personally thought it could be better. I sat down at various times to create something new only to come up with zilch. I wasn’t inspired… until recently – I was at the park with our two children and there was a gang of five kids being loud and playing with the equipment in unsafe ways.

Judah, my seven year old, immediately wanted to play with them. They mostly ignored him, and as his mom, I was okay with this in the sense that I didn’t want him playing with the trouble-makers. But my heart also ached for him, you see Judah is different – he struggles with social skills and kids his age often get frustrated with him and exclude him.

This experience struck a chord with me and simultaneously so did inspiration. Juvenile ravens often travel in gangs and in this “unkindness” design I feature four black ravens confronting a white raven. Biologists assert that white ravens have a tougher time in life and sometimes can be rejected by their typically black brethren.

The word “unkindness” is featured in the skeletal branches of the tree above the scene.

We focus so much on our differences, and that is creating, I think, a lot of chaos and negativity and bullying in the world. And I think if everybody focused on what we all have in common – which is – we all want to be happy. ~Ellen DeGeneres

T-Shirts will be available for purchase in the next couple of weeks. They’re also available our Redbubble store if you’re not local.

Be kind.