Shroomtober: thirteen mushrooms, four days late
I should have seen this one coming
The last line of my Gnomesummer post was Mind the mushrooms. It was a nod to the storybook gnomes, small enough to shelter under one. Two months later, the mushrooms have their own project.
It's called Shroomtober, and it started the way my projects apparently start now: four days into October, late. This post is arriving a week after that, so at least I'm consistently behind.
The rhythm I'm trying this time
Goblintober last year was a daily sprint: one goblin a day, 31 days, a prompt list for every one of them. I loved it, but looking back, the constraint did half the thinking for me. Gnomesummer was the opposite: five gnomes over a whole summer, and time to sit with each one until it had an inner life.
Shroomtober tries to keep the best of both. The October calendar from the goblins, the slower, character-first pace from the gnomes. The target is 13 paper minis before Halloween. Thirteen because it's the right number for the season, and because when you start four days late, promising 31 would just be setting yourself up to fail.
No daily schedule. Just a deadline.
No list, on purpose
This is the part that's genuinely new for me. With Goblintober I had the whole roster on day one. This time I don't.
I have some ideas about who else might live in this little colony, but I'm going to discover them as I draw. The real mushroom comes first: its shape suggests who the character is, and the character suggests what they do in the woods. If something better turns up halfway through the month, it gets in.
And it's not a warband. The goblins were an army; the gnomes were a village forced to defend itself. The Shroomfolk aren't fighting anyone. They forage, they carry things, they get on with being mushrooms.
The only rule I've set myself: every new mushroom needs its own silhouette. At paper-mini scale the cap does most of the talking, so if two of them look the same from across the table, one has to be redrawn.
#1: Amanita Shroomfolk, the species before the jobs
No armour. No weapons. No trousers. Just a mushroom that somehow grew arms, enormous feet and a smile.
I drew the first one plain on purpose. Before I could draw a mushroom with a job, I needed to know what a Shroomfolk is: two dots for eyes, a tiny curve of a mouth, a stem that just carries on down into a body, and feet far too big for it. Everything that comes after inherits the face, the body language and the feet, and changes the rest.
Each mini starts as a sheet like this one: front, side and back views, with the palette swatches along the top. Only a handful of colours, and the red is doing nearly all the work. Then the front and back go onto a 55 mm strip, ready to print, cut, fold and base:
#2: Chanterelle Forager, the first one with a job
The second one has work to do: a woven basket, nearly full of berries and greens, and a very pleased expression about it.
This was the first real test of the silhouette rule. The easy trap was drawing "the Amanita, recoloured orange". What saved it is the chanterelle itself: the cap flares up into a wavy funnel instead of doming down, and the gills run all the way into the stem. So the body got taller and thinner, the feet a little narrower, and the palette went golden. Same face, same feet. Family resemblance, different shape.
And next?
Honestly, I don't know yet, and that's the fun part. Eleven more mushrooms are out there in the woods somewhere, and I'll find out who they are when the pencil does.
2/13. 🍄
Cheers,
Horacio Gonzalez - LostInBrittany
Shroomtober is published by Korrigan Press, where the project announcement lives. Progress goes up on Instagram @lostinbrittany under #Shroomtober.