World of Rot

A compendium of mushrooms, bugs & other slimy decomposers! (and some side notes on other rotten things)

Mar 27, 2025

As promised, I have not clogged your inbox!

I realise there are quite a few new subscribers on here, so I’ll start by thanking you all for being here and reading all of this. Substack feels like the friendliest platform in my social media spectrum now (but I’ll take recommendations if you have any).

I initially started writing this post to celebrate that a book I illustrated last year –World of Rot– was selected at the Society of Illustrators’ 76th Illustrators exhibition,
which has been on since March 8th and through Apr 12th, 2025. If you’re in NY and can make it, please send pictures!
The title of the book also felt timely in the current global context.

I’ve been wondering about the multiple non-beneficial uses of a.i., social media companies and their questionable owners –a different kind of rot– and how to work and share within creative industries today.
I read a great post by Mariska Gewald a few days ago, which echoes some of these topics too. Are we all wondering how to move forward and power through things?

World of Rot was the dream home for me and my work for quite a few months last year. When I received the first reference images from the author, the brilliant Britt Crow-Miller, I was hooked: she had taken pictures of a rotting bird to keep a record of its decomposition over time. I had been taking improvised macro photos in my compost bin for months, and they were going to prove very useful!

I studied biology before becoming a graphic designer and changing my mind about what I wanted to do professionally did not deter my curiosity about the natural world and the discoveries we still make about it. There is a scene I love in Pirates of the Caribbean, in which a character is painting a world map in the background. Something is said about pirates not being able to hide any more, and it is quite refreshing to think that they were wrong, we still do discover new things. And that's what bugs me with a.i. and people being blindly in love with it. There is no “mapping out” our processes, and quite a few creatives are leaving the instagram map.

Don’t get me wrong, I use a computer on a daily basis and enjoy quite a few techy gadgets, but the recent events have made me want to share less on platforms that have no respect for our practice. I miss the old days of instagram when I would see the work of the people I admire and get an urge to draw.

Improvised macro photos taken in my compost bin (just use your lens the wrong way around to to this!)

Nothing can compare to the satisfaction brought by the process of growing seeds –and cuts I find in my neighbourhood–, fixing my bike lights or a friend’s tyre, sharing the prints I made in my makeshift-toilet-printroom. Things a.i. can never replace, yet it produces artificial stories and images that seem to say it can. The 2 hours I spent drawing in the park can never be replaced by a few clicks and soulless instructions.

Quite a big chunk of the work in this book is digital. I printed textures with a print roller, stamps and made random marks with different materials to us them on scanned and edited drawings.

One of my favourite characters in World of Rot is not even an animal. It’s nurse logs. When a tree falls, it becomes the home of an enormous amount of living things closer to the ground: funghi, bacteria, moss and plant species like ferns. A sort of self-made ground-reef. Isn’t that the most beautiful metaphor of hope? It takes forever to happen, but it’s worth it.

Moving forward

Before we move forward, consider subscribing if you enjoy this!

I want to tell everyone –on and off line– about World of Rot and how honoured I am that it will be part of an exhibition at the SOI, the same as I want to keep making things, drawing, writing more books and now also teaching. Spending time with younger people is incredibly refreshing. Their sense of discovery is unbiased, and that is contagious.

Morning dew, exercise example

I have had to design activities and exercises for them and rather than teaching them how to draw or conceptualise ideas to turn them into images, we started the other way around: making random collages of black silhouettes and gluing together discarded objects to make 3D characters, then giving them titles to come up with ideas. Thinking through making, and in collaboration with a whole group.

Marvellous elephant made by my 4 semester BA students at Centro.

We also stamp basic shapes in 2 groups, then swap sheets to crate characters by stamping with a complementary colour, using whatever was already on the page, and trying to remove any kind of pressure as there aren’t any expectations regarding the result. These images can be final or pure exploration to develop something further.
I really enjoy the feeling that something may be unfinished, in development, ever changing. I try to teach students to enjoy the process rather than focusing on the end result only. I play with those same exercises myself when I feel stuck. They provide an endless library of ideas that I would never have come up with by just browsing online, writing or even drawing.

Some of the first test images I made for the book were a set of beetles, which ended up staying in the final version. One of them –a dung beetle– set the tone of the book by saying “Hi, I’m Sisyphus”, which I found quite funny. Those jokes and puns were not kept in the final, but the attitude of the characters was influenced by that part of the process. Some ants screaming for help after falling in a bottle of soda or a pelican being disgusted by an oil spill can still be seen on the final pages.