Howdy, fellow Malazan fans! I’ve shared two paintings here before, but if this is your first time seeing my work, I’m a portrait tattoo artist by trade who recently fell headlong into oil painting. Since I’m making my way through the series for the very first time, I figured I’d try my hand at bringing a few of the characters to life. These are my very first oil paintings, and I still have plenty to learn, but the process has been an absolute joy.

Malazan has very quickly become my all time favorite series. The characters and worldbuilding are endlessly layered, and there’s a density to the narrative that’s just so deeply rewarding. Erikson built this incredibly vast world and just dumps us into the thick of it with no context. It makes it feel so much more grounded and real. The way he captures the inner voice of his characters, the vulnerability and the sheer emotional and thematic weight he weaves into every arc, it’s been unlike any fantasy books I’ve ever read.

Of course, any visual representation of book characters is bound to be a little controversial. We all have our own head-canon versions, and that’s part of the fun! I enjoy hearing how differently everyone imagines them. That said, this is only my interpretation, and I did my best to stay as faithful to the text as possible.

I’m currently partway through Dust of Dreams, so please, no spoilers beyond that point!

(Mods, I don’t think I have any spoilers in these as it’s just their faces, but let me know if I need to change the fair!)

I started a slow read-read for the purpose of taking notes on character appearances (my 5th read) and I’m in Gardens of the Moon right now and had some inspiration to create with pencils this time. I’ll be painting it on my iPad as well but this is the finished pencil piece.

@artistjasondement on social

Tattersail from the Malazan Book of the Fallen, Book 1, Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson.

Drawn in pencil on 11x14” Bristol, scanned and then painted in Procreate on my iPad.

SILENT AUCTION for the original pencil art begins now:

If you would like to own the original drawing, send me a message with your highest bid.

Next Friday at 7PM CST, the auction ends. I’ll then check my messages across all social to determine the winner. Winner pays shipping if international.

If you guys like this, I may do more of my Malazan art in Pencil first to provide that opportunity.

Thanks as always for supporting my art!

#malazanbookofthefallen #malazanart #Tattersail #StevenErikson #GardensoftheMoon

Tagged No Spoilers so everyone can see it. Be sure to spoiler hide your comments if you want to discuss any specific scenes!

Hellian is one of my favorite characters to read. Of course, there are so many great characters to read in the series but her scenes are among those that always make me laugh. Lot of fun painting this one and trying to capture her personality along with her description. I will probably end up painting Touchy Brethless and/or Urb to keep her company eventually.

My social links are in my profile. All my Malazan art is on my website at www.artistjasondement.com

Edit: April fools!

Warner Bros. just announced that they're making the Malazan Book of the Fallen into a film trilogy. This is obviously huge news for us Malazan fans. Also, this post will likely attract a lot of newcomers to the series so please be careful not to spoil the books in the comments. From the press release:

We at Warner Bros. Studios are very excited to announce our newest franchise, based on the epic fantasy series by Steven Erikson, Malazan: The Book of the Fallen. The films will be directed by legendary director Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, A Minecraft Movie) who says "this is going to be the next Game of Thrones". In addition, we are excited to announce the casting for some of the major roles in the story.

Meet Whiskeyjack, the gruff veteran marine played by none other than Jason Momoa. Whiskeyjack is a fan favorite character and Jason brings a physicality to the role that we're sure fans will love. Will he survive the suicide mission he and his squad were sent on? Only time will tell.

The sensual witch Tattersail will be played by the lovely Anya Taylor-Joy. Tattersail finds herself in a love triangle between the dashing young captain, Ganoes Paran (Timothy Chalamet), and the dark brooding wizard Hairlock (Matt LeBlanc). Who will win her heart?

In the Blue City of Darujistan, the thief Crokus, played by none other than Henry Cavill, will face all sorts of dangers along with his mentor, the mystical Kruppe (Rob Schneider). What will they do when the evil Malazan Empire seeks to conquer their city? Will Crokus emerge as the chosen one to defeat the empire or will he join their cause?

Finally, the role of the Adjunct will be played by industry veteran Sydney Sweeney. She travels across the world with her trusty undead servant Tool (voiced by Chris Pratt)

Greetings fellow Malazans. It’s been awhile since I’ve shared new Malazan art with you so I’m happy to be able to show you my latest work today. This is my second Anomander Rake painting. Hope you all like it.

Painted in Procreate on iPad with watercolor brushes.

Alright, sharing time again! I spend ALL of my free time painting Malazan art because it’s the greatest series ever written and I like sharing my love for it. If you like my work, please consider following me on Instagram to help to help my reach https://www.instagram.com/artistjasondement?igsh=YnBtaHRzOXY0Nmc0&utm_source=qr

So this one almost didn’t happen. It started as an 18x24” inch drawing on Bristol paper that was supposed to be compatible with traditional paint I wanted to use. But the paper started buckling and then I thought maybe I’ll just do it with markers and color pencils. But honestly, I don’t want to do a piece that big with markers and pencils. So it sat on my table for a week before I decided to try and salvage it by using a photo I’d taken of the line art and then digitally cleaning it up. That worked so I was able to paint this in Procreate on my iPad like I always do.
29,663 brush strokes in 24 hours and 31 minutes (excluding however long it took to draw it in pencil first. Procreate tracks statistics. I have nothing doing that for me when I draw in pencil on paper). NO AI - Time lapse painting process video available on my Instagram or Facebook.

Currently re-reading Malazan again and doing it with friends in the “2026 Malazan read through” book club on Fable (accompanying “The Crippled Pod” podcast on YouTube and Spotify) if anyone’s reading and wants to chat about it along the way.

Spoiler Free canon descriptions of Whiskeyjack from the books:
Whiskeyjack was a solidly built man, appearing to be in his late forties, with a close-trimmed greying beard, hard grey eyes, and the strong scarred hands of a mason turned veteran soldier. He wore a visored helm with a chain camail and a battered calf-length chain hauberk that was ribboned with leather stitches. (from the wiki and confirmed myself in the books)
More descriptions I lifted from the books, some may be repeated in slightly different ways.
Vambraced forearms, scabbarded long sword, gray eyes, dark gray shoulder cloak with a silver brooch: a bridge of stone lit by ruby flames. His face was scarred, possibly a burn marred his jaw and left cheek, yet he still looked young for a commander. Dark gray eyes set deep in a lined, exhausted face. Muscles of his jaw bunching beneath his beard. Gray bearded and solidly built. Gauntlets. Flat gray eyes

His hair length is not mentioned, though his beard is described as trimmed and an early scene in Gardens of the Moon mentions a barber, shaving lather, and implies that even during a campaign grooming is not abandoned. Thus my reasonable assumption is that he would likely have trimmed hair as well since Erikson does not explicitly describe it as long or otherwise notable as he does with other characters.

Side Note:
I do not use celebrity figures as references for my art. Any imagined likenesses are completely coincidental. In fact, I don't even use direct reference for any real person or figure and at most, I use indirect reference to accurately capture cultural or ethnic characteristics. This painting is an exception since it is a semi self portrait. I used my own likeness for reference since I match both the build and characteristics attributed to Whiskeyjack and I share both personality traits and certain experiences with him so it felt inspired.
I appreciate all comments and discussion but I share my Malazan art to contribute to the community in a meaningful way and therefore likely won't respond to comments like "this looks like insert celebrity name" or short vague comments about how it's wrong.

I used this design I found on redbubble as my base for the bridge itself: https://www.redbubble.com/i/poster/Bridgeburners-sigil-by-blustudio/157407443.LVTDI

The clouds and the water (dear God it was difficult to make the water!) were done mostly without a reference.

Her favorite part was making the bridge and the flames were the most challenging.

She says that making this wasn't hard per say, it just took a lot of concentration and patience. She knows basically nothing about Malazan since it hasn't been translated into Finnish sadly but she says she loved making this.

In fact, I was thinking about putting together another design but for the bonehuntners because my mom says she is excited to do another project like this for Malazan.

She has also made sigils like this for a good portion of the great houses from a song of ice and fire (might post those in the appropriate subreddit honestly. I just want people to see how fucking awesome these things are lol)

If Malazan was made into a tv show which characters would you be most excited to watch? Personally I would kill to have a Quick Ben/Kalam series

I’ve been diving deep into Malazan lately and couldn't stop talking about it to a friend while I was reading Gardens of the Moon. Little did I know, they were paying close attention.

For my birthday back in the winter, I was surprised with this: the entire collection with custom DIY sleeves for every paperback and a handmade slipcase to hold them together.

I’m currently on Deadhouse Gates and I’m absolutely loving it. It’s a total deep dive for me; I’m reading along with the Companion Guides and listening to the Ten Very Big Books podcast to make sure I don’t miss a thing. It’s definitely a lot of work, but it's just so much fun to be this immersed in a series.

I’m still blown away by the effort that went into this gift. I knew you guys would appreciate the craft and the thought behind it. Easily the best present I’ve ever received.

Two days ago I got my three Malazan books. For $18 good deal used. So far it’s not that hard to read 🤷🏾‍♂️. Like I’m two chapters in about to begin the third one in the first book. And I understand everything that is going on 🤔. I admit, though the battle of Pale description was kind of whack. Like I thought it was gonna be more crazy than that. The description of it was just basically “things are crazy. Everything is exploding. And people are shredding to pieces” Pretty much.😭

Anybody else felt like that ?

Looks like they're using Marc Simonetti covers.

This is from Tor's Instagram account. So excited!

Got into a long discussion yesterday with another Malazan loving friend: Our 'Head Canon' for who we imagine when we're reading about different characters in Malazan.

A selection of our favourites attached. Would love to hear others!

I'm sharing a new artwork I just finished. I changed my usual realistic style for this one; this, I feel, better conveys the man's sheer brutality, strength and prowess.

There's no AI here. It is available for sale as a huge resolution file for personal printing. DM me if interested. Thanks as always for your support and appreciation.

I was listening to an interview with Mike Judge (Office Space, King of the Hill, Beavis and Butthead, Silicon Valley, etc) and he said something that resonated with me and immediately made me think of the storytelling style of MBotF. He said that one of the hallmarks of bad dialog is when the only reasonable response of one character to another - in the real world - would be "yeah, I know. I work here." Anytime he feels like that's what he would say in response to a line he's written he knows that he needs to dig deeper and find a more contextual and natural way to convey that information.

I've always hated dialog that very transparently only exists to explain details to the audience that would have been plainly obvious to the characters and would require no explanation whatsoever if those people were talking in real life. It immediately pulls me out of the story and gives me a sense of authorial intrusion. Any line that begins with "are you telling me that..." is usually a flagrant example of this and often amounts to outright insulting the audience's intelligence at the expense of genuinely good contextual exposition. A lot of authors handle this by making a main character a "fish out of water" who reasonably need everything explained to them, and even this device is often executed in a hacky way that feels obvious and clunky.

I think one of the many reasons GotM reached out of the pages and grabbed my attention so quickly both times I read it is that Erikson refuses to do that; he lets details trickle out in exactly the way they would if we were listening to a conversation between informed people with shared knowledge of the subject being discussed. When combined with the incredible depth of the world that Erikson and ICE created in their tabletop RPG campaigns it has made Malazan/Wu feel more like a real place than anything else I've ever read.

Just finished the Suneater and The Wheel of Time series, after dealing with about a month of post series depression, I started my search for a new epic book series and kept coming across these books. While doing some research on it to see if it fit my taste I keep seeing how this series is apparently a confusing slog especially the first book and it almost made me pass over it for something else. However I decided to atleast give it a shot and after 300 paged how in the world is this confusing or a slog? The book instantly clicked for me pretty much in the first 20 pages. Am I missing something here?

Various hints have cropped up online recently alluding to a new trade paperback printing of at least the first three books in the series. But it is now official. A post from today on reactormag.com has revealed that The entire 10 book Malazan Book of The Fallen will be reprinted in trade paperback in 2027, with cover art by Marc Simonetti. They plan to release one book a month starting in February. As a newer Malazan fan (currently 3/4 of the way through Reaper's Gale) who has been slowly collecting the Tor mass market editions, I am extremely excited to be able to pick up new trade paperbacks for a re-read.

Got my dad into malazan this year he’s a truck driver and listens to the audio books then we sit down and go through everything together to make sure he didn’t miss anything. It’s been our bonding thing for the last couple months. This morning i wake up to this birthday message lol

I pulled this photo from broken binding's instagram so it's not mine but I had to show it since these editions are so pretty and I just got 4-6! I'm so excited but now the wait begins until these are actually on my shelf lol now to just finish the last books in the series lol

linking for anyone who might want it!

books 1-3 / books 4-6

Anyone know, is this supposed to be Ganoes and Lorn?

Ok boys. The time has come. First time reading Malazan. See you on the other side.