BIO of KRIS MCDERMOTT ( aka THE MAPHATTER )

I am a 42 yr old Melbourne-based man with a background in Freelance Graphic Art, Creative Writing and Illustration and the sole artist of GTW.

 

I grew up in a remote part of New Zealand and deeply appreciate Nature while also learning the necessity of being ingenious when it came to playing RPG's such as Heroquest, D&D, Ancestral Trail etc and making do with bits of paper with crudely drawn items, spells and monsters instead of fine but expensive miniatures, props and tokens. I greatly enjoyed adventure and fantasy even as a child brought up on Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, Lord of the Rings, Fighting Fantasy, Pick-a-Path, Enid Blyton and the Faraway Tree and the like and was instilled from an early age with a fascination and deep love of detailed worlds and spent many months at a time crafting every aspect of huge worlds full of characters, shops, monsters, beautiful scenery and frightening traps. I have experimented with and been influenced by a large variety of styles of art such as Lovecraft, Geiger, Dali, Tolkien, Escher. This was accompanied by a simultaneous devotion to fantasy table-top RPG's, board games and later on computer (particularly C64) and console RPG's which I dearly love to play: Skyrim, Baldurs Gate, God of War to name a few.  I use electronic mediums to create my works, finding GIMP a powerful and wonderful tool for putting together diverse and detailed creations. I began my journey with RPG in 2015 but have spent my life studying the occult, traditional and ritual magic, alchemy, psychology, sociology, social engineering, philosophy and theosophy. I am currently working my way toward creating 'The Meanderverse' - a modular battlemaps system with a minimum of 3000 maps by close of 2023.  

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Please feel free to drop me a line and say hi, suggest new themes/products or report any product/site issues through my contact me section. :) And thank you very much for supporting my art.

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Kind Regards, Kris.

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FAV. RPG: D&D5e
FAV. ACTION MOVIE: BATMAN BEGINS
FAV. HORROR: IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS
FAV. FOOD: SEAFOOD / THAI / SALAD
FAV. MUSIC: MARILYN MANSON/EMINEM/PARKWAY DRIVE/PLACEBO/ TUPAC
HOBBIES: EXPLORING WONDERLAND WITH MY PARTNER ALICE, CARTOGRAPHY, STAR GAZING, CAMPING, BACKYARD FIRES, COOKING, WRITING, PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, THE OCCULT, THEOLOGY, SACRED GEOMETRY, TEXTURE-HUNTING, MOVIES/TV SHOWS, PAINTING, DRAWING, WORLD-BUILDING, ANCIENT CULTURES, ARCHAEOLOGY, MARTIAL ARTS, VIDEO GAMES, EXERCISING and RPG
FAV. WRITER: H. P. LOVECRAFT / CARL G. JUNG