Founding Members of the Natural Foot Society

Ant Hill

Looking around my studio for the strangest thing I can share this week... I think it has to be these drawings. 

I don't even know how to explain this. 

I started by drawing five colourful little creatures with a variety of 'adventuring gear' - ropes, pitons, belts lined with vials and knives, backpacks. Then I made that into a poster for my son's room where the quintet is lined up under the title 'Founding Members of the Natural Foot Society' (derived from a name in Gerald Vizenor's Chancers).

Then I made up character sheets for these five fellows using a tabletop roleplaying game (RPG) ruleset.

Then I started drawing a huge map of an anthill and doing a lot of research on ant physiology, ant hills as hive minds, and insects that cohabit with ants, or live alongside them in ingenious ways.

Now I'm using the RPG to simulate what would happen if the Natural Foot Society (founding members) had to enter a giant anthill that was infected by a weird phantom spirit disease. 

Then I started drawing scenes from that simulation. (It starts violent, but it's going to change as the NFS become more like ants and see the hive as a body and organism that they are now integrated with.

Now I'm filling out the simulation with dialogue, and starting to write a script so it all makes sense. Also writing a roleplaying game scenario for it. I think it would be interesting to roleplay a being who comes to experience what it's like to be part of a larger hive-mind.

So that's something I'm doing. 

(ps. did you know that adult ants can't digest food because their abdomens are too narrow? They don't produce digestive enzymes, but their larvae do. So ants carry solid food to the rooms where the larvae live, and soak the solids in pools of enzymes that the larvae drool out, and then they suck up the dissolved goop. So the brood of the ants also functions as a living 'gut' and digestive organ for the whole nest-as-body.)