On Redbubble – Hogfish Designs

Category: On Redbubble

February 10, 2018

The earth phoenix

Acrylic on canvas, 60x20in. Sold for $250. Available as a print and on mugs and stickers at Redbubble.

I was inspired by a photograph of a hillside at sunset. I really love how white fluid acrylic mixes with the other colours to create a sense of brightness. I began by painting the background with Ironlak fluid acrylics. I sprayed on plenty of water with a spray bottle, and tilted the canvas around a bit to blend the colours.

The paint always looks so much bolder when it’s wet. I love the dark pink “mulberry” colour in the bottom left corner of this picture, and how it blends into the lighter pink. Using light and dark shades to create depth adds so much to my paintings, even in abstracts.

When it was dry, it looked like this.

I thought it looked kind of like a dreamy, rainbow-coloured mountain. Or maybe a fantastic rainbow-spewing volcano. A friend of mine saw something totally different – the entrance to Bifrost, which is a mythological burning rainbow bridge that connects Midgard (Earth) and Asgard. This is why I love sharing my artwork with others.

Now, this is where I ruined it. While the above was still drying, I noticed some weird little black bits had found their way into the painting. I tried to get them off with my fingers, but I messed up the paint. I sprayed water on to try to fix it, but it created an awkward blob shape in the middle of the painting. Just great.

I thought well, I’ll worry about that later. I poured green paint to create grassy hills. I can’t really show you the resulting mess because I didn’t photograph it, but it was horrendous. Really. It seems like every time I reach for the green paint, some disaster happens. Green is not a creative colour. I tried adding brown, thinking maybe that’ll make it look less like a bright green blob. Nope, that made it worse.

When the fluid goes rogue, it’s paintbrush time. I painted the grass instead.

SO much better already. You can see some of the weird-looking fluid on the left there. I painted the rest of the grass, which really didn’t take as long as I thought it might. I quite liked how there was still watery green from the fluid blending into the background – it added to the surreal, dreamlike feel of the painting. I decided some of the grass should be windswept because reasons.

Now it was time to paint over that damn blob. The painting needed some kind of focus anyway. Landscapes are great and all, but they can look a bit empty without some kind of entity for focus. But what does it need?

FANCY BIRD.

I found a photo of a peacock in flight online. Peacocks are the fanciest of birds. They always make me giggle because they’re just so over the top. Like it’s not enough that I’m a gigantic, shiny, colourful bird with super long tail feathers- check out my MASSIVE TAIL FAN. However, after painting the peacock, it still wasn’t fancy enough. This wasn’t a place for any ordinary fancy bird, this needed a legendary status fancy bird.

So I made it rise from the grass, glorious in its allergy-causing earthiness. Fly, earth phoenix, fly! It makes sense anyway – you can’t be a fire phoenix if you live in the grasslands. You’ll just set fire to everything.

February 8, 2018

Sticky

Acrylic on canvas, 23.5×23.5in. For sale – $120. Also available as a print and on products at Redbubble.

I love honeycomb – it’s one of nature’s beautiful patterns. Also it’s delicious. I made the background of this by printing out a hexagon as a template, cutting it out, then tracing around it in pencil on the blank canvas. Then I painted over the pattern in black. I used fluid acrylic and water to make organic-looking shapes in the honeycomb cells. Then I added more fluid acrylic to the top of the painting to drip down like sticky honey. This was the trickiest part – getting the drips to drip down straight. It was made even harder by the fact I was painting outside and it was very windy.

I found that it was easiest to get straight drips when I was inside, and if I added no water to the fluid.

I prefer a “gritty”, textured look to my paintings so I sprayed some black aerosol onto the drips before they dried.

Finally, I looked up a picture of a bee online and copied it onto the canvas in purple using a paintbrush. I thought purple would really pop against the yellow background. This was a lot easier to do freehand than I thought it would be! Maybe I’m getting good at this.

February 2, 2018

Crash

Acrylic on canvas, 30x40in. Sold for $250. Prints and other products available on Redbubble.

This piece was inspired by the ocean crashing against the rocks. It reminds me a lot of the coastal areas where I grew up, where that crazy ocean would leap onto the rocks repeatedly.

I used a technique that I learned at a class by Elana Mullaly for Ironlak Brisbane. She showed us how to spray aerosol onto watered down fluid acrylics to create a “wave” effect. This also created a barrier between two paint colours – perfect for dividing the blue sea from the brown sand or rocks. This is the first painting I’ve done since that class where I feel like I’ve really “got” the technique. I love how the fluids and the aerosol create a beautiful sense of movement.

I added a bit of geometric abstract flavour to it in the form of straight lines criss-crossing over the painting. I used thin painter’s tape (like masking tape, but low acid so you don’t hurt your paint) to create the lines before I added the paint. I still hadn’t worked out how to get clean lines this way – the very wet paint “bleeds” through this way. But my intention wasn’t to create clean lines, but rather to create a template I could use to draw gold lines over the top as a final step. This worked fine, although painting the lines by hand was pretty tedious. Next time I’m going to try painting a transparent gel medium over the tape to seal the edges, before I add the paint on top (a tip I found from Googling this problem after the fact).

The painting, still wet, with the painter’s tape visible from underneath.

I finished the painting with a touch of gold aerosol – my instinct just told me it needed it.

September 9, 2017

A lightbulb moment

I’ve been recovering from surgery for a few weeks now with limited mobility especially in my arms, which has been very frustrating. I missed my creative outlets so I drew a couple of pictures on my phone using Sketches and used a grunge filter in Snapseed for texture. I keep coming back to Sketches because it’s easy to use and the watercolour tool blends colours so wonderfully. Unfortunately, using Sketches comes at cost if I want to export works to Redbubble – that cost specifically being AU$14.29/month for an Adobe Photoshop subscription just so that I can resize and create a transparent background. This stops your image looking like a tiny image with an ugly rectangular background around it when you try to put it on a shirt.

To see how I did it, check out this post where I’ve put step by step instructions for how to make your image Redbubble-ready using Photoshop.

I made this image with a black tank top in mind and I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

If you’d like one for yourself, go check it out on Redbubble.

August 10, 2017

Badass tester marshmallow

My friend Anne-Marie Charrett recently commissioned me to create a couple of artworks for her. The first is this badass testing marshmallow, which is in reference to her recent podcast interview by Keith Klain. The second was a car with wheels made of stone, made for a blog post she is writing.

These pieces were a great opportunity for me to try out the new iPad Pro and Apple Pencil that I recently purchased. Compared to using my finger as a stylus on my iPad mini, it’s a massive improvement. The bigger surface means I’m not having to zoom in as much to add detail, and the stylus gives me much better precision. And I should bloody hope so, because it was not a cheap upgrade. I bought the Logitech Slim Combo with detachable keyboard and it’s awesome. It has a sturdy, adjustable stand and the keyboard is much better than the Apple smart keyboard cover. It almost makes the iPad a viable alternative to my laptop, as long as I’m not doing anything that needs a serious computer (like programming, or using Photoshop, or serious vector drawing tools, or…so yeah writing and drawing only).

I’ve also started using Procreate, which offers some more Photoshop-y level features over Sketch (which I have been using up until now on the iPad mini). In particular, setting a transparent background is a big win. The smudge tool is great too, giving me greater control over colour blending. I haven’t fully explored this tool yet, which is quite exciting. The main beef I have with it so far is that the palm rejection is not great. It’s better than no palm rejection at all, but it’s still very annoying when I put my palm on the surface of the iPad and unexpected things happen to my drawing.

Each of these drawings presented a similar issue – how do I draw a simple object, simply, but still have it look like the object? Specifically, how do I make a sketch of a rock look like a rock, and a line drawing of a marshmallow look like a marshmallow? Rocks themselves are okay, but trying to convey that something is *made* out of rock is pretty tricky. Initially I drew the wheels on the car as thick, grey wheels with sharp edges and made them quite large to draw the eye to them. They still didn’t look quite rocky enough. So I ended up adding some rocks to the ground in the same style, to emphasize the connection between the rock-wheels and the natural rocks on the ground. I think it worked.

With the badass tester marshmallow, there were three very unique concepts to emphasize within a single entity – a badass, a tester and a marshmallow. The badass part was easy – biker jacket, sunglasses, done. The tester part I could take care of with the words on the biker jacket – testers don’t really *look* a certain way so that was the only reasonable way to address that. And for the marshmallow – well I thought if I just made it a puffy white cylinder then it wouldn’t say “marshmallow” enough. So I thought, what about a TOASTED marshmallow? That’s pretty badass too. Then I could put that delicious toasty marshmallow top on it. Just to drive the point home, I added a “STAY PUFT” slogan on its jacket sleeve. I think it works. The flames ended up adding some really great colour to what would have otherwise been a mostly black-and-white design, so I’m glad I went in that direction.

Badass tester marshmallows are available for purchase on Redbubble.

If you would like to commission me for artwork, let me know via my contact form.

May 18, 2017

Bin Chicken

Once, my brother asked me if I’d like to be in the metal band that he and his friend were starting. I was of course bloody stoked at the idea and immediately accepted. Inspired by one of our potential band names, I created this artwork named after the garbage bin’s most fearsome predator.

Unfortunately, my brother and I had an argument about the direction of the band and I ultimately decided to focus on my solo career. It was a real shame, especially since we hadn’t even had our first rehearsal yet. And so ended the dreams of the first ever metal band featuring a lead guitar, a ukelele, a soprano and a metronome. Ended before it had even begun.

However, good news! Its memory lives on forever in t-shirt form. You can get it on Redbubble in colour or black and white.

March 27, 2017

Duck gazing at ice-cream

It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Yet, somehow he felt empty just looking at it.

That’s what I wrote to describe this piece when I first drew it on a tiny notebook many years ago. Who can understand what a duck sees when it looks at an ice-cream cone? Only the duck itself, and perhaps even the duck does not understand.

I guess I like this because it’s weird and tasty. I think it’s great that the duck hasn’t tried to immediately eat the ice-cream, but instead is just taking a moment to take it all in and ponder the meaning of existence. I think that’s what they call “mindful eating”. It’s like when you eat a raisin but instead of just devouring it without thinking, you think about what a pointless life it’s had up until now and how it’s all wrinkled and dead just like you’ll be someday. What a great way to enjoy meals, and indeed life.

Buy this design on Redbubble or regret it forever.

March 25, 2017

Hello brewtiful

I tried to give up coffee a few times, since apparently caffeine is bad for you. It didn’t go well. I became so irritable that people around me started to beg me to drink coffee again. So it looks like I’m stuck with you forever coffee, you dark beautiful beast you.

I started this whole Redbubble thing in the first place because I wanted new coffee mugs. Currently I have a total of four coffee mugs – two that I like and two that I dislike.

Mugs that I like:

The mug I got on my first day working for Wildfire, which has the old Wildfire logo on it and my name. Ah, memories.
A mug I’ve had for about 20 years that has a picture of a green tree frog on it on one side and scientific information about green tree frogs on the other side. I like frogs. I like frogs a lot.

Mugs that I dislike:

A mug my parents bought me in Greece with badly-drawn cartoon cats all over it. It’s much too tall and holds slightly too much coffee.
A mug I’ve had since I was a teenager with my full name “Patricia” on it, explaining that “Patricia” means “noble”. It has a picture of a cartoon blonde princess on it patting a knight on the head, and a poem that says something about how I’m a “prize for a knight in shining armor”. Words can’t begin to describe how much this irritates me.

Since 50% of my mug collection bothers me so much, I decided it best if I just designed my own mugs that would bring me joy and coffee. My first idea was to put a picture of a coffee mug on to a picture of a coffee mug. Makes sense.

So I drew a picture of a mug in Sketches and put a happy cute face on it because coffee makes me happy so why shouldn’t it make the mug happy? I don’t like to think of my mugs as resentful servants, more like amiable kitchen helpers. But I guess deep down I still suspect they might see themselves as resentful servants. I just have to remind myself that this is their problematic attitude, and not my fault.

Buy this mug on a mug or on a t-shirt if you fancy, from Redbubble.

March 25, 2017

Pretty clouds

I’ve always loved clouds. Maybe it’s just because my middle name, Mei-Yin, literally translates to “pretty cloud” from Chinese. Maybe it’s just because they’re big and puffy and chill and they make rain sometimes which I also quite like.

I’ve drawn three cute clouds here – a happy sunset cloud, a sombre rain cloud and a cloud that’s done a bit of a whoopsie.

I first drew these little clouds in a notebook with the intention of someday making them into Facebook Messenger stickers with vector graphics, but when I tried to create them in Sketch (a vector graphic program) they just lost a lot of their character somehow. So on a plane recently I had another crack at it using my new favourite iPad app, Sketches. I’m much happier with how they turned out.

They took a few tries before I was completely happy with them. My discovery of the ruler tool was a game changer in the end. Then I decided to do something really fiddly and make them into a repeating pattern. This took a lot, lot longer to get right. It required Photoshop, lots of duplicate layers and a whole lot of patience. If I didn’t love my little clouds so much, I would have given up partway through.

But hey, check it out! I made a repeating pattern:

Check out these and other products with this design on my Redbubble store.

March 18, 2017

Rawr goes the dragon

Dragons are just the cutest, right? I grew up with a pet cat, so I’ve always loved things that look cute but can rip your face off. Dragons are like the cats of the lizard world. This one doesn’t bite much.

I drew this one on my iPad using the Sketches app. This was drawn before I upgraded to the premium version but I’m still happy with how it turned out. Here’s a tip for drawing cute stuff – round things are cute. Just draw a bunch of pudgy ovals and join them all together. Instant cute.

Then again if people like round things, why don’t I get hotter after eating nothing but burgers and chocolate? People are weird, man. If you like round things, why not buy something round with this nice round dragon on it?

Buy this design on shirts, stickers, bags, cushions and more at Redbubble.com