You’ve done a fantastic job on the art for Dragon Brew!

Thank you, I have had a lot of fun working on it. It’s been the largest individual project that I have taken on to date.

What other projects have you done that you are especially proud of?

I think that my largest accomplishment previous to Dragon Brew was my blog Feature_Creature, I decided in July of 2014 that I needed something to keep me honest in terms of producing art. So I made a blog where I tasked myself with finishing two finished illustrations a week, simply for myself. The goal was to push art out into the world and with no end date, is was a pretty big task. I maintained this regime for a long time, sometimes missing the odd drawing here and there, but these illustrations were eventually what led Daniel to contacting me about doing art for Dragon Brew. I’m planning on returning to Feature_Creature on a more regular basis now that I’ve finished principal art for Dragon Brew.

What is your artistic background?

I am mostly self taught, that is not to say that I didn’t have mentors growing up, (the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree my parents both are artistically inclined) but it’s been hard to wrestle the pencil and sketchbook out of my hands. I spent a lot of time in various art classes as from as young as 7 or so, and my parents were amazingly supportive with my art and allowing me to be inspired by whatever I saw around me, letting me watch Alien when I was 12 to see Giger’s Xenomorph, or getting copies of the Advanced D&D books from the late 70’s for my 16th Birthday, or allowing me to read comics like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, without worrying if they were ‘appropriate’. I was enjoying them, so they were fair game. I also had an amazing mentor in my hometown who I would visit once weekly in my early teens. He would stop his whole day and we would go to a coffee shop across the street from his house and we would draw for 3 to 4 hours. It all amounts to practice, and experimenting with style and technique. Despite my love of drawing, I went to school for Industrial Design in Toronto, and then I found a Makeup for Film and Television in Vancouver, both utilized my illustration skills but I never went to school for illustration specifically.

What inspires you the most when being creative? Other art? Music? Prose?

I listen to a lot of Podcasts, I find the talking heads keeps me in the zone while I work because it keeps me half distracted, so the illustration flows naturally. Welcome to Night Vale is a big one for me, along with Within the Wires and Alice’s Isn’t Dead by the same creators, and also QWERPLine by Loading Ready Run, many science and skepticism based podcasts have been very influential in my art. I self identify as an artist who needs to have the creatures he draws as something that still needs to inhabit a world, even if that world is fantastical, the biology, and story of this creature needs to make sense some how, so the more I know about the physical world that I know we live in the more that I’m able to push the boundaries of a fantasy or science fiction world that I’m trying to create in my drawings. I also love cartoons like Gravity Falls, and Steven Universe, worlds that are internally consistent, so they have their own set of rules and the creators will use those rules to heighten the story they are trying to tell instead of the story dictating how the world works, or at least a balance of both.

Do you play board games? If so, what are your favorites?

I try to play many board games, I have a regular group that I try to play with whenever we can work out the time to get together. My favorites have been Time Stories, Terra Mystica, Paperback, Dominion, or Sheriff of Nottingham. I recently tried Stone Age for the first time and rather enjoyed it, I love seeing how a certain batch of rules will make people jump through hoops and to see what make them and the game tick. My main game however is Magic: the Gathering, which I admit I probably spend a bit too much time and money on, but I do my best to keep that particular hobby to a reasonable limit.

When you were creating the art for Dragon Brew, what experience did you want the player to have when presented with the art?

I wanted the player to feel like they could be part of the world that we were creating, Daniel always discusses having fun when he talks about making, and playing games, and he has also said that was one of the reasons that he thought that my style would be suitable for Dragon Brew. I try to have humor in my work in order to tell a story, even a small one in my art, something of curiosity, or an unexpected conflict or drama. I wanted the player to be able to see themselves in these character races, and to reflect the abilities of the races. For example the Goblins, they were done almost first in the art process, and they are meant to be running a kind of black market because they don’t have a homeland of their own. I decided that they should be equal parts cordial and untrustworthy, and I did my best to design around this, so that a player could look at the art, and it matched the mechanic on the card.

The other thing I tried to do was to put hidden stories across a few cards for the truly eagle eyed players, but I’ll let the players try and work out what they are.

What fact about you would surprise us most?

I’m left handed. And I have had an unexplained phobia of quicksand since I was a child.

How can people contact you for artwork(or other things)?

My portfolio site can be found here, machillier.wixsite.com/vilejellystudio.
And my tumblr which has more updates regularly is found at vile-jelly-blog.tumblr.com/

Written By

Dave A