* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Randy Ortiz is a self-taught artist and he illustrates and designs his art by attaching his mouth to a goatfish, secreting an anticoagulant into the host, and drawing with the blood and melted tissue that spills from the gelatinous orifice.
Rumor has it he began his life as a burrowing freshwater larva; toothless, with rudimentary eyes, and a taste for microorganisms.
Ortiz transformed into an adult human through metamorphosis. It involved a radical rearrangement of internal organs, development of eyes and transformation from a mud-dwelling filter feeder into an efficient swimming parasite and sexual tyrannosaurus.
He draws influence from the dead shells of insect vessels ravaged by parasitic cordyceps, naturally careful not to inhale the deadly strings of ascospores created by the flask-shaped perithecia.
