A Review of MALUSTRIOUS BROOD

 A book of monsters, of visions. A 102-page pure art book with “12 iconic monsters from the pastiche swirl of d&d’s fantasy pool ….

Art, and Expressionist art in particular, is hard to review and think about, so instead I forced the artist to do that, by interviewing them! What follows is a pretty wide-ranging interview gathered roughly into the following general subjects;

There are lots of close-ups of fragments of the pages, used when talking about specific elements, and because I didn’t want to try replicating any of the full illustrations other than those already included in the promotional text. I wouldn’t want you to take the impression of these fragments as the impression of the works as a whole, let along when held in hand, which creates a much stronger impression.

Texture

pjamesstuart; ok so a huge amount of the book seems to be its textures. Are these different on every single page?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Yup different on every page, each was hand layed (with the cut out images on top) out on a piece of real estate sign for ease in scanning. This actually turned out to have some problems later because I didn’t cut the real estate signage to consistent size.

pjamesstuart; Did you have any particular plan for these?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; That each monster section should have its own unique background texture. That’s about it

this is printed on the paper (my photo isn’t very good)

pjamesstuart; They seem to be made up of complex layers of actual physical materials treated in various ways, and maybe of some deliberate use of digital scanning errors? What else went into these?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; I’m not sure about deliberate scanning errors..oh wait no yeah the Catawhere has some . Oh and the Orc and Eye Tyrant chapter heads.

Done by dragging or moving an image while it was mid-scan.

One of the Catawhere was done with photocopy fuckery.

Some of the process for the textures involved digging through a box of ink and texture experiments and seeing if anything was suitable.

Or just messing around with whatever paints/oils/spraypaint/ink/paper I had lying around and then letting it dry outside, and then sometimes using it but often reworking it or not using it at all.

90% blind experimentation and then selective curating the results.

Though wanting each chapter texture to have its own feel meant sometimes I went “okay no more ink shennigans , going to have find something else”

John Blanche once said that with a really good picture, even the smallest part of it, when examined in isolation, should be interesting to look at, which I think is true of this book.

pjamesstuart; How did working on the textures intermix with choosing and making the figures? Did it happen in parallel? In Sequence?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; For the vast bulk of it the pictures were done first, then textures created and pictures arranged as the textures were done.

However the decision to create a chapter head meant needing to create a extra page (as to keep the page count divisible by 4) , and sometimes that meant creating more drawings for the extra texture page.

pjamesstuart; Whats a ‘standard’ (if any could be), workflow for making a page of Malustrious Brood?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Um.. once the drawings were “done” (i.e I thought I had roughly enough be doing a crude layout) , I’d dig through my old projects and experiments and see if there was something. If nothing , try and think of something I hadn’t messed around before with and if it felt appropriate to the vibe of the creature.

Then once this , sometimes considerably back and forth, process had created a use texture page , I’d then try and arrange some of the drawings on it.

This usually resulted in frustrations that I was going to have to cover up the most interesting bits of the texture, as none of the texture pages were created with that much considerable with where anything would go on top.

Sometimes the drawings would get swapped between pages as space and overall context demanded. I tried to get all the loose sketches together and also give the more developed ones space to breathe (often giving them their own page just for them)

So yeah it was a whole process of curation , reacting and adjustment , to get the drawings to work with each textured page, there wasn’t just in the way of a deliberate plan.

The Orc probably had the most planning as I wanted to have them “echo” through the background of subsquent Orc pages by photocopying and repeating some of the drawings (sometimes on transparency film).

Plus trying to get a “very angry school boy creating a scrap book of murderers , weapons and world war 2 facts” feel to it

A quick video of the boards;

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Incomplete list of things used in the textures:

Rags, stained rags, old singlet, old t-shirt, design on old singlet blown up with photocopier to giant size, lace, glue, grease, baking soda, rust, blood, ink , spraypaint, butchers paper, vinegar, pva, spray varnish , water colour, ohp transparency , sewing diagrams, house paint, translucent paper, real estate sign imagery

Colour

Many forms are almost like beer tankards filled with a thick cloudy brew slowly mixing into something else

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Nothing super conscious , other than seeking a more diverse palette as the project went on

If I had planned it out more , I would of made more an effort to have the Nerieds be more greens and the Sylphs be more blues. As it was they ended up blending into each a little too much.

As a fix for that I post scan adjusted the Nereids colours a little and arranged the elementals by the name Elemental so the Sylph and Nereid wouldn’t be right beside each other.

pjamesstuart; Most creature-types have a main dominant colour that appears in a variety of forms, and maybe one or two other spot colours. What tells you what colours something is meant to be?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Again just vibes. Some got a bigger range of colour experimentation (ogres) , others arguable got too little (Salamander, Gnome) . I think the monsters that already had a strong consistent design, that I myself wanted to redefine (Orcs, the Elemental Spirits) , I ended up sticking to a narrow focused palette , while the ones were it was already wide open (dragon , ogre) I just went with whatever. I’m not 100% sure why though

(Eye Tyrant might be an exception here)

Basilisks got a lot sickly colours , and I wanted to really have some jaundice yellows, bruise purples , infected pus greens in there. Anything to make this thing look dangerous.

closeup of a highly polychromatic beast

pjamesstuart; What did you use? I see pens like biros, felt tip pens? Some things look like watercolours but could be created some other way.

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Yeah good old biros, felt tip pens of a variety of quality , ethanol to bleed inks out, water colours, water colour crayons, regular crayons, twink, charcoal , ink , acrylic paint, house paint, pencils, photocopy toner

pjamesstuart; Some colouring follows the shading a form might have, other colouring is more like you poured thick liquid into a glass the shape of the creature and shined light through it. Other is like lines of energy within a beast. Do you know when you start out what you are going to do?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; I think I always start with the “line” and add lines until it’s done or it needs something else , then hit it with colour using whatever medium.

Then it’s a case of adding more colour or line to fix whatever just went wrong and it either working out or turning shit , in which case start again.

I heavily favour mediums that can put on top of each in any order , as I don’t think I’ve ever successfully done the old “little pencil, colour blocking, final inking” method. I’ve tried it , but it looks so lobotomized when I do it, I’ve all but abandoned that approach.

Crayons are a pain as you can’t really go over them that well but can successfully go pretty much anything else, and allow colours that lack innate opacity to go over darks.

Back to the question: I have “hunches” and “itches” but every step is a surprise and something like a friendly but heated argument .

I’ve got a maxim about “an Okay drawing is useless” , so if a drawing feels like it’s “okay” (as in I can reliably create something with that amount of Good) , I’ll keep experimenting until it hits a “high tide mark” or otherwise rare quality I’m not sure I could get again. (this might not mean it’s a final drawing, it might instead be saved to serve as guidance )

Or it’s completely destroyed , but valuable data and inspiration is generated.

I think of this as sacrifices to Tiamat; and sometimes you just lose a drawing that seemed to have potential , and sometimes you get a happy accident.

Speaking of which:

pjamesstuart; This isn’t really about colour but; some places monster faces & other things are scratched through, or blasted over, so it feels like the page was a screen and was glitching or a photograph that was overexposed. How did you do this?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; This is the whole “keeping going until the drawing is destroyed or brilliant” thing. Sometimes the page actually rips , requiring sticking additional paper underneath. Actually sometimes something on the other side ends perfectly fitting and getting used. The eye on the Antiphoenix from Veins of The Earth is actually a mark on a piece of paper that was beneath the initial drawing . It was revealed when a hole was torn from working on too wet ink and then permanent attached to the drawing when it perfectly fit.

This is Tiamat throwing me the occasional blessing for everything in art and life that I’ve inadvertently sacrificed on her altar .

One of the Manticore’s has a similar effect , but I think it was me scrapping back layered crayon to rework something and the underlying effect was really good so kept it. I think I added a pupil though?

Composition

pjamesstuart; Thanks for the responses! Next I want to talk about COMPOSITION, (after that will be ‘form’ which will be the last one).

Do you know there is a kind of natural curl to a lot of your single-page compositions? Especially for the more lithe & loopy monsters? I will try to make a little image of this.

It begins at the top left, curves into the centre or lower right, forms a pool there and spirals out into the lower left again, often as a tail or limb

Other compositions are ‘blot’ or ‘block’ monsters which are placed like they were poured into the belly of the page and then slowly spread out.

The ‘loop’ in particular reminds me a lot of the Z shape Frazetta often worked into his painting.

Did you have any particular plan for composing the one page and two page images, or any effect you wanted to achieve?

What was the methodology?

How do you know if a page ‘looks wrong’ or ‘feels wrong’?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; HUH

I did not know there was this SECRET SIGIL

Out of all the haphazard intuitive processes that went into this book, composition is probably the most haphazard of all.

The considerations are mainly so each drawing gets enough “space” and doesn’t too greatly mirror or be similar to the surrounding drawings (including any on a opposite page)

EXCEPT when its a collection of “concept” drawings, where I thought it grand to show or suggestion the developing of the process and the various alternative possibilities that rapidly fire off in my brain

Other considerations is to with the gutter and place the monsters, were possible , so they don’t look like they are running away into the gutter (so heads to the edge, tails to the spine)

Form

pjamesstuart; Edge Detection – does your brain have this? Because the vision of the world one often gets from your work is that things often just don’t have boundaries, but kind of vibrate like quantum particles, or blur like a time-lapse map of the borders of eastern europe. I mean, are edges a thing in your reality?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Yes But No. Like there’s this deep deep deep contrary instinct in me that always seeks out contradictions, exceptions, inconsistencies, stray threads and just Points Them Out. I think it manifests in art (somewhat) by a resistance to going “yes this definitely the Limits Of This Things” , and a desire to portray the buzzing border of potential movement, past movement, spiritual intensity, failure of perception, stink, noise, unclarity

So it’s like Post Modernism going “look at all these things obstacles that prevent us from seeing truth”

but unlike.. whatever strain of post-modernism is that kinda goes “so..guess truth isn’t really thing”, instead we must see The Noise as well as The Signal

like understanding the limits of truth should make us appreciate the effort for truth and not dismiss it to seek solipsism

pjamesstuart; dang you actually have a philosophy behind this

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; It’s more I getting philosophy from it if I look at it and think about Why, but ultimately I do it because it’s my nature

pjamesstuart; Is a body for you just a carrier for eyes and teeth? The toothed grin is like a signature for your work. (Also, did you know in miniature painting some painters emphasise ‘eyes and teeth’, because they seem to play some dominant role in helping people perceive and organise a facial form?) If you have EYES plus TEETH, what is the third or fourth thing you need to show what something is?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; I think they are just really good at giving a coherence to something incoherent and because my drawings risk/are total incoherent explosion , slapping the teeth and eyes in there really gives it a hook.

The spine or jawline tends to be the first thing I draw

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; yeah but badly? I’m terrible at drawing things in front of me , I don’t have very clear “mental images” , drawing almost feels like sculpting with twitchy ambulatory wire to me? Like the pen starts making marks and I battle with it to get it to do something I want.

But spending frustrating time trying to draw accurate from a reference does help inform this “sculpting”. To that end , I’ve attended life drawing books, have several (Probably over half a dozen?) anatomy books (human and other animals) and spend time and effort learning about the muscles and the bones etc.

I also find it really interesting because I Too Have Bones and Muscles and The Desire To Improve Them.

But I think it’s know how impactful departure from plausibility is when it comes to monster design

pjamesstuart; Do you have preferred shapes? (A slight teardrop shape seems to come up quite a bit in a lot of your art.)

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; I try and avoid falling into patterns too much , but the most consistent shapes that show up when I start scribbling are:

Long shapes like snakes, eels, sharks

Beaked shapes or triangle head shapes

Ambiguous quadrupeds

Hunched over big limbed bipeds

pjamesstuart; Do you know when a form is right? How do you know?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; It’s like.. when someone tells a joke and the when you realize that you think its funny? In fact laughter is sometimes my reaction to when I get a form or expression right. There’s a sense of both surprise and recognition ?

When a form is wrong.. it’s either because it’s obvious and absent of energy (something can be obvious and Have Energy though) or like something about it interferes with its own dynamic and needs The Energy Bolded or The Blockage Destroyed . Or I guess it’s just gone completely wrong and its not even recognizable.

Orcs

pjamesstuart — How on earth did you come up with so many good pictures of fucking Salamanders? 😂 There’s like three bangers in a row here.

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD — Lizards is a good shape

Think the palette there is a bit monotonous but the expressions are really good

Conceptual I’m most pleased with my riff on the orc

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD — That it riffs off the old use of it meaning “spirits of the dead”, Tolkiens use of as the spectre of industrialized warfare, and dehumanization monstrosity cycles.

Plus having a fancy angle in suggesting they are a memetic virus that co-opts the ” immunisation” response ( the fear of the enemy becoming or being orcs is a vector for infection as people justify their increase in brutality and ruthlessness)

But also can work as a pure game utility “it’s okay to kill these guys because they are distilled war criminals”

Visually I tried to get some of the Orcs to have this ambiguous mix of panic, hate , anger, fear

While others are pure hell bastards

But yeah one of the nasty things about war propaganda that is tapping into the legimately fear that any human population has a capacity for brutality, and that brutality is easily expressed on outsider groups

And by exploiting that fear , it then feeds and utilizies that capacity

To be honest my original motivation for putting design notes in between the chapters was do a bit how fucking weird dominant voices solution to “fixing” orcs was to lean hard for into “we are 1000% here all our fans making their sexy noble savage baddie OC 😍😍😍”

But nah didn’t think it was worth the page space doing a The Kids Aren’t Right bit

The only bit I left in like that was mentioning the extra limbs on the Catawhere

I also had a bit about manticores getting wings from Gygaxian shenanigans idk just seems like filler

Ditto some early waffle about the origins of some of these, like fuck I just wikipediaring, people can do that themselves

Big Ideas

pjamesstuart; That was all I could think of to ask about the art in a ‘pure art’ sense, like about the acts of creation and construction, but I haven’t asked any like ‘meta level’ questions, (which I tend to avoid), but you did have a fair amount of complex ideas about Orcs, so;

• Are there any ‘big ideas’ you had about the monsters?
• Anything you discovered or thought you understood more?
• Anything you were trying to get across?
• Is there….. a SUBTEXTS???? or like a metaphor or meaning or whatever, in these images?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Yeah any “big ideas” I tried to include in the chapter heads.

While the initial idea was “do a bunch of versions of that monster” , the process involved exploring both what is the essence of that monster both visually and conceptually/psychologically.

With both very intertwined and probably inseparable, but still distinct somehow.

think exploring the concept-essence of each monster was far more of a reductive process; like is a hag a hag because she lives in a hut in the wilderness? Or is a hag likely to be in the wilderness because she’s feared ? And then why is she feared? It’s her power, and what are her powers etc?

Compare a manticore being in the wilderness , to me you start losing something of the manticore if you take it out of the wilderness, there’s something about the manticore that is a manifestation of an unknown wilderness and the wild stories that start coming from it.

Actually as an aside here these are actually different wildernesses. A wilderness with a hag in it , is the wilderness “beyond the hedge” , a wildness just outside your lights and most tread paths. (so could be remote villages, sewers , slums, ruins, back roads, islands etc).

While manticore wilderness is “here be dragons” wilderness; blasted nigh untamable terrains and desolate vistas.

Having a “here be hags” on very remote area of the map or a manticore living in a forest a hour away from a city , creates interesting questions but I think both are subversions or deconstructions.

As in doing something interesting with a disconnection or conceptual jolt, which only happens if something about it doesn’t quite make sense.

While exploring the visual essence of each monster was (mainly) and expansive process; seeing how far I could push it basically.

But note when I talk about any of this I want to be clear it’s not the “ideas, theory, then art” that art academic likes to present as The Only True Path. All this is stuff I think about in retrospect or sometimes as a weird chattering aside in my brain as I work on something; it’s commentary but it’s not the navigator or captain

I think ultimately art is the space the between words, if its completely reducible in words then you should just use words

Good art often makes you be able to think about stuff and come up with big strings of words and ideas , but it’s a terrible mistake to think that’s ultimately Is The Work

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; To use a tree metaphor , it’s like a fruit tree. The art is both the tree and the soil and the mycoline web and whatever else . The words you can say about it is the fruit. Fruit is portable, countable, immediately digestible and a trade good. But to think only of the fruit and the not the tree (and everything connected to the tree) is a deep and profound foolishness .

As is dismissing any fruit tree not currently having pickable fruit as basically not existing

EDIT: Though this metaphor suggests as we only plant fruit trees for fruit , we only should create art to talk about it, but I reject both of these concepts, but must acknowledge that people could think that a) That’s the only reason to plant fruit trees therefore the metaphor says..

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Wait one more thing and jumping back , with a couple of the monsters (gnomes, orcs) there’s like a cluster of different big tangled concepts and my reduction process would be a deliberate rejection of basically alot of the most popular , but arguably essential concepts, that exist in current culture.

Orcs I guess digs deeper into the psychological underpinnings of the “barbarians at the gates” and brings in some of the Tolkien fear of industrialization, so that’s still engaging with the popular view.

While gnomes basically rejects everything anyone has done in the last 100 years and tries to include knockers and kobold mythology as gnomishiness

FINAL STATEMENT 

pjamesstuart; Excellent. Finally, would you like to end the interview by saying anything grand, insane, overwrought and/or megalomaniacal? (Purely in order to maintain SCRAP WORLD brand coherence.)

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; THERE’S ALWAYS FREE CHEDDAR IN A MOUSETRAP BABY

Behold; monstrum

A book of Others. A book of visions. A book where every night for a month, or a year, someone slept and deliberately had nightmares, or at least, deeply hallucinations, and each morning they woke up and drew pictures of those nightmares. (And then narrowed them down to the best.)

Every sophont dwells within a necessary cage of thought, one concept piled upon another, growing in slurries and small leaps, but only ever from one central point. Yet, in every case, the boundaries of expansion, of what can be comprehended, and of what can be imagined as comprehended, must be challenged; such is the flame of life and mind.

Thence; the Other, the known but un-known, a beast woven from what is and what may be.

The meaning of this is always discussed; mapped one way, the book of Others is just a map of self, for where else can the Other be conceived, so that, in roving further and imagining deeper, seen as a whole, the conception of self becomes more clear.

Others say ‘no shut up this is actually a book of monsters’ – a searchlight pointing outwards, illuminating the storm-wracked unknown, and the metaphor of a searchlight is perhaps the best; for those at one end, an honest attempt to pierce the dark, attention pointing out, but for those watching from the silence, a statement saying ‘here am I’.

As critiques of course, we consider both at once.

All I dislike about it is the glued spine but book production and distribution from New Zealand is fucking nutty so take what you can get frankly.

You can buy ‘Malustrious Brood’