BIO of KRIS MCDERMOTT
I am a 40 yr old Melbourne-based man with a background in Freelance Graphic Art, Creative Writing and Illustration and the sole artist of GTW - this is all my own work.
I grew up in a remote part of New Zealand and learned 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 have experimented with and been influenced by a large variety of styles of art with influences from Lovecraft, Geiger, Dali, Tolkien and hundreds of others. 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. 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, Balders 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.
My previous job involved me delivering plasterboard and steel around Melbourne with a ute and eighteen foot trailer as well as driving a forklift: working 55+ hours a week it left virtually no time at all to devote to my love of making things in GIMP, or building any sort of strong social media following. After losing my job for refusing to operate an unsafe vehicle I am now in between jobs and doing my best to make a go of my skills as an artist supplying table-top gamers with my various tiles, tokens, cards, maps and mats, slowly developing my range and adding more and more to it as I go from project to project hoping that I can get enough support to make a living from what I love doing. Anything you can do to help me, is greatly appreciated. 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. :)
Kind Regards, Kris McDermott.
