Redbubble Designs
For a time I was convinced that uploading designs on Redbubble and similar print-on-demand on websites could generate a decent passive income. If I played my cards right I’d be able to retire to a life of idle luxury.
That turned out to not be the case, but it was fun and a good way of practising design and illustration and trying new things out.
A lot of the designs were inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. I loved reading his stories about strange happenings in worm-eaten New England towns when I was a teenager, and helpfully he’s out of copyright.
The Innsmouth poster did well, so I felt compelled to follow it up. The Arkham illustration was extremely detailed and took a very long time. I did a lot of research to try and make sure the various locations in the fictional city were present in the illustration. The Kingsport one I did just so there’d be three of them (no one really remembers Kingsport from the stories).
I drew and published a few versions of the “Cephalopods” t-shirt as I was convinced there was something there. I’m pretty happy with the cuttlefish in the final version, but nobody ever bought it. I think canonically the Miskatonic University sports team is The Beavers anyway
Faux travel posters seemed to be popular. I had an idea that I’d do a whole series of them based on classic, out of copyright novels, in the style of travel posters from the early-mid 20th century. In the end I only did the Dracula one, which sold pretty well, relatively speaking. The image on the left is the final version, after I decided to simplify everything and make it more graphic (and added the coach racing through the forest bearing poor Jonathan Harker to his fate). Digging through the files, I found the earlier version and quite liked it, so I’ll stick it here too. Despite measuring everything out carefully, I had trouble getting the castle straight.
For a while I kept seeing t-shirts with little retro mascots on them. I had an idea that I’d do a bunch for different, made-up businesses, and I even wrote silly back stories for Gino’s and LeBlanc’s (which annoyingly ended up being too long for the Redbubble description field). I thought it would even be fun to make some fake ads for Instagram as though the companies were real, with mocked up photos of premises and employees.
Needless to say, no one bought any.
I think the next one in the series would have been an anthropomorphic baked potato with a toothbrush moustache for a company called Spud Hub.
Next up, miscellaneous designs, most of which were intended to be the beginning of a series that I never got around to doing more of.
I was really pleased with how the dinosaurs turned out (my nephew was mad about dinosaurs). Helpfully there are only about 5 or 6 different basic types of dinosaur, they just come in slightly different shapes or have spikes in different places. The Dimetrodon isn’t even a dinosaur though, so I should have gone with Deinonychus or something.
I think the Dungeons and Dragons alignment idea was a good one (lawful good, chaotic evil etc), but this design took me too long and ended up being too fussy to work. It’d be worth having another go at.
The bear was an attempt at doing some geometric animal designs, which I kept seeing in the “best selling t-shirts” sections, but I wasn’t any good at designing them.
The Prancing Pony t-shirt did gangbusters (and got cloned on every other online t-shirt shop) until Big Tolkien got wind of it and I got a telling off. The secret to print-on-demand success, I discovered, is really just copyright infringement.
The two comic book-style portraits are LeChuck from Monkey Island 2 and Kurt Russell’s character in The Thing, my favourite game and film respectively.
There’s a guy who gives workshops on YouTube about how to make oodles of dough by spamming t-shirt designs on Redbubble. I’m not sure whether he really does make lots of money doing this, or rather by selling books and workshops about how to do it, but he seems like a nice guy. I bought his book (it wasn’t expensive) and it was full of good advice - publishing a few designs to try and cash in on Halloween was my attempt to follow it. They weren’t great, didn’t sell and then I got bored and moved onto something else. (And that’s why I’ll never be a Redbubble millionaire.)
The pug was my attempt to exploit the slender intersection of pug-lovers and fans of 19th century gothic horror novels. I drew it on my wife’s iPad in ProCreate - it was the first time I’d used it, so it came out a bit scratchy.
The Redbubble guy drew a bat design on his livestream, and I think I just copied his idea. His had a much better pun (“I like big bats and I cannot lie”) and a better bat drawing.
Thank you for accompanying me on this trip down memory lane!