Swindler & Swindler

Legend of the Jade Rabbit

Year
2025
Client
Lady M
Agent
Folio Art

An illustration for a rotating lantern, extended across the full packaging of Lady M's Mid-Autumn gift set.

A Second Lantern for Lady M

A New York pâtisserie at the crossroads of French technique and Japanese culture, Lady M treats its gift boxes with the same care as its cakes. For Mid-Autumn 2025, the maison entrusted the studio with the Jade Rabbit Lantern Gift Set — a second collaboration built around the lantern format.

Lady M Mid-Autumn gift set: two pink hexagonal lantern boxes with gold detailing, individual boxes and mooncakes, with the jade rabbit night scene visible through the cut-out windows.

The commission covered the whole set: the interior of the hexagonal lantern, the shopping bag, the individual boxes, and a sheet of isolated elements for secondary applications.


A Seamless Image

The constraint was mechanical. The interior illustration unrolls across a rotating support: it had to close on itself, with no visible join, around the square column.

The full Lady M lantern pattern laid out flat, used to demonstrate the cylindrical wrap.

Margot worked directly on the developed template, treating the joins as part of the drawing rather than a last-minute technical fix. The repeat had to stay invisible — it carries the entire effect of the lantern in motion.

Vectorization followed the studio's method, layer by traced path. More colors than the first lantern: more layers, more decisions per path, a longer phase that becomes largely invisible once the image is finished. We return to this method in our article on fine-line vectorization.


Elements That Lift Away

The same illustration had to live at several scales. The sheet of isolated elements lets motifs and ornaments be pulled from the composition and set down again on the bag, the boxes, the secondary surfaces.

Sheet of isolated vectorized elements for the Lady M set: rabbits, lanterns, fireworks and gold and mauve floral motifs on a white background.

Each surface receives its portion of the drawing, at the right scale, without losing the coherence of the whole. Everything was delivered in vector, secondary applications included, in a short window — one to two weeks, with no revision rounds.