The studio

About DancheongStudio

A small Seoul studio turning Korea's public pattern heritage into working design files.

Korea has one of the richest ornamental traditions in Asia — the painted dancheong of its palaces and temples, the inlaid celadon of Goryeo, the lattice, textiles and rice-cake stamps of Joseon households — and almost none of it exists as usable vector artwork. National institutions have digitised thousands of motifs and released them under the Korea Open Government License, but as archive scans and loose Illustrator files with stray points, open paths and inconsistent sizing.

DancheongStudio starts from those public works and does the unglamorous part: cleaning and closing every path, removing artefacts, normalising size and stroke, checking that each motif survives recolouring, and building the ones that repeat into properly clipped seamless tiles. Every motif ships as SVG, AI (PDF-compatible), PDF and transparent PNG, in its original colours and four flat recolourings — indigo, terracotta, jade and gold, grayscale — with a README that names the source title in the archive.

Sources

Two archives supply the raw material. The Korea Heritage Service (digital.khs.go.kr) published vector drawings of the dancheong of Changdeokgung Palace, which became the palace-ornament group in Vol.01. The Culture Portal run by the Korea Culture Information Service Agency (culture.go.kr) holds several thousand traditional-pattern drawings classified by theme — plants, animals, geometry, characters, clouds and landscape — and is the source of everything else. Both release under KOGL Type 1, which permits commercial use with attribution. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by either agency.

Where to buy

The packs are sold on Etsy (shop name DancheongStudio) and on Gumroad; the files and license are identical. A free sample with one motif from each volume lets you test the files in your own software first.

Follow

New motifs and pattern experiments are pinned to Pinterest, and each volume has a project page on Behance. For licensing questions or custom vectorisation of a specific Korean motif, message the shop on Etsy.