Looking Back At Some Monsters

Why it all started

I've been creating a weekly monster for a few years now as a way to challenge myself. The premise was to come to the drawing board with no idea of what was going to draw and spend a few hours creating something cool without spending a whole lot of time making it perfect.

No revisions. No pre-planned sketches. No pre-existing creatures. Just Monsters.

When I first I didn't have any rules outside of that first general idea of making something kool without having an idea of what I am going to draw. They just developed as I did one every week and continued to expand a little at a time over the years. Originally I was just going to draw them and then later I started to write up details about what they were and how you could use them in a tabletop role-playing game. And course this evolved into having a Patreon and making books and adventures based on the creatures I came up with.
Honestly, I spent a lot of time as a kid drawing monsters and such. It was memories of being a kid and drawing these fun monsters and such that kind of sparked this idea originally. That and other artist friends who said I needed to put my self out there a bit more; and by "self" they meant my artwork.

The First Of Many

My very first Monster Drawing was a fungus person. Not really a Myconid but similar. I called him a Shroomkin and left it at that. He started out as an odd-shaped blob, a silhouette of black on the page. I learn this concept designer technique in college, where you make a strong silhouette by drawing a random shape on the page and filling it in with black. Then you draw on top of the silhouette and pull a figure out of that shape.

 For a while, I was also doing these weekly drawing challenges that are very similar, where they would give you a weird shape and you would draw a character design out of it. It was a lot of fun.

Monster Number Two

Using the same process every time I was able to come up with different designs and I was often surprised at how well they came out.
I use Adobe Animate (Flash) to draw all of these monsters and there really is not a reason why beyond that I like to use it for this. Something about painting in Vector is enjoyable, and since its vector, you can change the size of the monster to any size smaller or bigger without losing resolution.

Monster Three

It was at the point when I designed the Troll Hound that I started to come up with the beginnings of background information about each Monster I drew. Like the Troll Hound, a weird creature that Trolls raise and train in a similar fashion to what humans train dogs.
At this time I also started to expand where I was posting these drawings. I found a discord group, that sadly not very active anymore, that ran the Monster-A-Day Reddit. Every day they would writeup a new set of monster stats for new monsters to use in D&D 5e. So I started to post my images to their Discord and a few of them even were given full writeups based on what they thought when they saw the image. Here is this Troll Hound, also known as the Crocanine.

More to Come

I plan on posting more of the monsters I drew in the first two years over time. If you find any of these interesting, you can check out the first Collection of Monster Writeups I have over on my Shop, called Here be Monsters; Vol 1. Which is currently only available in PDF form. It consists of 14 Monsters that you can easily drop into any game system. Each monster has a full ecology writeup to help you stat them out as well as run them.

If you would like to support me in drawing Monsters and writing RPG related content, then please become a Patron over on Patreon. At the lowest tier, you get a new monster writeup every month.

Any as always you can follow me on Twitter, where I'll post when I'll be going live to draw a New Monster every week over on Twitch on Friday mornings.