The Hypno Bat Sunflower Star crawled out of that strange territory where repetition stops being design and starts feeling slightly unhinged, like staring too long at wallpaper and realising it might be staring back. It began as fully hand drawn physical work, built from my original Hypno Bat line work in pen on paper before being finished digitally in Procreate, where I could stretch the symmetry, stack the patterns and let the image slowly multiply into something tidal and alive. With my latest Uncommon Animal illustration, the sunflower star, a many armed sea creature that looks like evolution kept adding parts just to see what would happen, the drawing followed the same logic, with marks accumulating patiently until the bat, the star and the pattern blurred into a single organism.
Working on it pulled my mind back to another kind of star, not the many armed creature drifting across the ocean floor, but the glowing stars of the screen from my old mobile cinema road movie. I built that business from nothing because I loved films, and hauling a giant screen across Australia to project stories under open skies felt like a completely reasonable dream at the time, turning paddocks and small towns into temporary galaxies of light. Towns gathered, strangers shared stories in the dark, and for a while my job was travelling the country creating fleeting worlds, until becoming a dad quietly rewrote the script and constant travel no longer aligned with caring for a newborn, making the romantic life on the road feel less heroic when measured against simply being present for a growing family.
Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
Letting the cinema go felt like quietly dismantling a version of myself I had worked hard to build. It was successful, it meant something to me, and walking away carried that uncomfortable feeling that maybe I was quitting something good, even though life was simply moving in another direction. Our family grew, I became a stay at home dad, and somewhere in that unexpected stillness the Fork in the Road podcast was born, followed closely by a rekindled relationship with art that had been waiting patiently in the background.
The Hypno Bat Sunflower Star feels connected to all of that change. I used to project films across landscapes, now I sit drawing repeating forms that pull people inward instead. Same impulse, different medium. Turns out some endings are less about loss and more about transformation, and occasionally the thing you think you are leaving behind quietly becomes the foundation for the work you were meant to make next.
Kids Book Illustrator Andy C Marshall 