The Devil Masks That Followed Me For Years

July 28, 2026

I first learned about the Diablos Danzantes de Yare as a kid, in school, the way most Venezuelan kids probably do. I remember thinking about how I'd even attempt to make something like those masks myself, half joking that I'd need the special glue from Art Attack to pull it off. San Francisco de Yare is a small town in Miranda state, Venezuela, and every year around Corpus Christi, men from a cofradía put on those masks and dance through the streets in a performance where good triumphs over evil, built from a mix of African, Indigenous, and Spanish Catholic tradition layered together for generations. In 2012, UNESCO recognized the whole celebration as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, which only confirmed something I already felt as a kid looking at those masks, that this was one of those traditions where the meaning runs as deep as the craft.

I've never actually attended the celebration myself, and I want to be honest about that, because the fascination came first from the outside, from the colors and the sheer skill in the mask making, and only later, as an adult, did I start to understand the cultural mixing underneath it, which is really the whole point of the thing. A few years ago a close friend visited and brought me a pair of earrings and a keychain with the masks on them, and I loved them so much that the idea went straight into my notebook. Back then the plan was actually to illustrate it as a children's book, not a pattern collection. That version never happened, and the idea sat in my notebook for years until I circled back to it with a different medium in mind.

When I finally started illustrating the masks for this collection, I ran into a problem I hadn't expected. The horns and what started reading like whiskers kept drifting toward dragon imagery the more detail I added, and I had to keep pulling the design back toward something unmistakably Venezuelan, toward the actual image of a man from the cofradía in his red costume and mask, dancing to defeat evil, because the last thing I wanted was for this collection to get confused with Asian dragon imagery.

Color turned into its own project. I started from the colors of the Venezuelan flag, yellow, blue, and red, then added orange and green, and quickly realized it was too much for one pattern to hold. I narrowed it down to three palettes, and in one of them I let go of the traditional red entirely and leaned on the mask's carved detail instead, trusting that the design itself, not the color, was what would still read as Diablos de Yare. In the pattern, I wanted the masks and the traditional costumes to carry the weight of the design, but I also wanted the feeling of celebration itself to come through, not just the objects but the energy of the thing.

The collection ended up as patterns in three colorways, two hero images fully applied, and mockups across clothing, silk scarves, and shirts. It's finished now, waiting to be licensed to a brand, or who knows, maybe I take the leap and launch it myself. What I do know is that part of the proceeds are going toward Venezuela's earthquake reconstruction, because I want to give something back to the country that gave me so much, the main source of my inspiration and my colors.