Dragon artists Hallow Darkfrost (right) at their art booth during a rainy Brunswick Pride event on June 8. Paul Bagnall / The Times Record
A Brunswick-based dragon artist is exploring the growing Midcoast art scene and looking for other venues to branch out their niche artwork.
Brin Stricklett, 24, began their journey as a professional artist, Hallow Darkfrost, in 2021. Stricklett started making dragon stickers and began selling them wholesale through the video game store Game Box in Topsham in May 2024. The Utah native has been living in Brunswick for the past 13 years.
“That was basically one of the things I started out with because [stickers] are very low cost and low risk to get into,” Stricklett said.
Stricklett’s interest in dragons began when their parents got them “Dragonology: The Complete Book of Dragons” for Christmas. The book describes dragons as actual animals, not mythological creatures, which fueled Stricklett’s obsession with dragons.
In the past couple of years, Stricklett has seen an uptick in art-focused events in the Brunswick-Topsham area and has been getting more active with the 2nd Friday Art Walks and other art events. Stricklett has also set up shop at Queer Makers’ Market in Portland, which was held earlier this month.
An assortment of dragon art stickers found in the Game Box store in Topsham made by Brunswick-based artist Hallow Darkfrost. Paul Bagnall / The Times Record
“I think art had sort of a boon during the height of the pandemic, so it’s really nice to see that communities are moving toward making that a bigger part of [the area],” Stricklett said.
Stricklett does all of their artwork digitally in whatever style they feel like doing at the time, but they don’t do any commissions because of the slow process it takes to create a dragon piece, and they don’t know how to charge fair prices for their artwork yet. They will look into commission work in the future, but for now, the plan is to stick to the product-based artwork.
One of Stricklett’s mentors was artist A.J. Lygo-Yarn, the owner of pocketbeancrafts.com, whom Stricklett has met at queer art events and took them under his wing to help Stricklett ease into selling at larger events.
“I would definitely like to see more [art]; we are already on a pretty good trajectory, but honestly, in this day and age, there is never enough,” Stricklett said.
Stricklett does not use artificial intelligence in creating artwork and is concerned about industry artists losing their jobs. They believe a jump-start on regulations around AI in the art scene is needed and think we are quickly moving towards AI regulation. In September 2023, Meta, the parent company for Facebook and Instagram, said in a blog post it plans on training its AI model on publicly shared posts from Instagram and Facebook that include photos and text. However, Stricklett does not know if the AI model has been trained on their artwork.
“AI is basically trained on millions of pieces of stolen artwork, which is a problem for a lot of reasons,” Stricklett said.
For now, Stricklett is sticking with Instagram because constantly changing social media platforms is exhausting and time-consuming. They are also tentatively on TikTok, but Stricklett has not developed an interest in short-form video content.
“I try to have a pretty wide array of things that I make because not everybody likes stickers, not everybody likes pins, but hopefully, I can have something that can appeal to everybody,” Stricklett said.
Stricklett also makes pins, beanies, keychains, lanyards, Gachapon teacups and mushroom dragon charms.
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