Arthropod illustrations

Last Sunday I was trying to figure out which pest our Monstera had, and looking through dozens of images of various insects, I realised how few insects I knew about. I’ve come to this realisation before, but it’s always amazing, the diversity out there. Looking at so many arthropods got me inspidered to do some arthropod illustrating, so I sat down to experiment with some new media (I got for my birthday).

The image up top is the male scale (which I never knew was a meaningful distinction). It is drawn with a felt tip and then coloured with water soluble coloured pencils. The image below that is a ladybird spider (or mushroom spider or Parasect), drawn only with coloured pencils.

The image up top is a net-winged beetle larva, drawn in the style that I feel most comfortable with, stippling. The image below that, is an adult psyllid drawn with sepia pencils.

I drew all four in one sitting. And since it was a Sunday evening, I was having a drink throughout the whole process. Strangely, the quality got better with each drink. I drew the psyllid first, which I’m unimpressed with, it looks very 2D, no depth. I drew the scale second – also 2D and kind of muddy. The ladybird spider was next. And by this point, the page had taken a number of sploshes of cider. My final drawing was the beetle larva, which was the most taxing in a number of ways (it was late evening by this point). But, it is definitely the style that resonates the most with me.

Aside from the psyllid, all of the images were based off photographs by Melvyn Yeo.

Natural history art – experiments in media

Here are some natural history illustrations I’ve done over the last few years. In the beginning, I hadn’t found a medium that I was completely satisfied with. It’s a constant ‘grass is greener on the other side’ scenario. I’d spend a dozen hours doing a drawing using pens, such as this one:

or this one:

And then I’d think, “drawings look much more appealing when they’re in colour”, so I’d try coloured pencils, such as with this wall skink:

Then I remember that my coloured pencil drawings often turn out looking like kids’ artworks.

This brush turkey was an attempt to use coloured pencils with paint, but at the time, I didn’t know how to prepare regular paper for watercolour. In the end, the paper got painted through (torn) and warped from all of the water.

After all of the trialling and erroring, I’ve arrived at some favoured media. I do like pens. And gouache is great. Oil painting is rewarding but extremely time consuming (takes a few days to dry after each sitting). The newest frontier is digital on my iPad – there’s a lot to learn there.

I have almost finished my latest painting Changyuraptor yangi, which is officially the longest any artwork has taken me. I can barely estimate, but it’s probably taken 60-80 hours so far. I (and my partner) am looking forward to finishing up and cleaning up all of the paint materials at last!

Jumping spider painting

The last thing I finished was this painting of this spider:

It took me around 12 hours to complete. For the model I used a photo from the artist Melvyn Yeo (http://melvynyeo.deviantart.com/), with his permission of course. This is a jumping spider, they’re beautiful animals and you can learn more about them by checking out the descriptions of Melvyn’s photos.

Thanks

The meaning of Pen Sapiens plus illustrations

To publish my comics/cartoons I attempted a Facebook page, but I only added people I knew. Unsurprisingly, the ‘likes’ didn’t get very far off the ground. So, I’m trying the opposite tact now: instead of Facebook, a blog. And instead of people I know, people I don’t. The first post on the Pen Sapiens Facebook page was this:

“According to the rules of taxonomic naming, as well as genetic relatedness, our species ‘Homo sapiens‘ could technically be renamed ‘Pan sapiens‘. This would give us two sibling species (rather than none): Pan paniscus and Pan troglodytes, also known as the pygmy and common chimpanzee. Maybe the name change would act as a passive reminder that we’re just “apes with ego trips”, a primate species with a 200,000 year old birthday and an eventual extinction date.”

Obviously being a comic book and being done with pens, I popped in a brainless pun and Pen Sapiens was born. Here are some drawins’ with such pens:

If you were to plop in hairier, chimpier humans in the place of humans

If you were to plop in hairier, chimpier humans in the place of humans

Pen Sapiens’ greetings with comic pages

Blog Sphere,

Welcome to Pen Sapiens. Here I’ll be posting the progress of my various projects, projects riding on freshly sparked inspiration, projects in for the long haul, and those projects that have flailed and died but which I’ll post up anyways.

I’m starting this blog for a few known reasons: to publish my plans and ideas into the ether which might pressure me into completing them, to gain access to the wisdom of folk with already flourishing pages, and hopefully, to entertain or inspire visitors.

For my first post, I thought I’d upload a comic book page. It’s the first page towards an idea for a comic book I had, and I thought that it neatly captures the fate of many of my ides and endeavours. I do have a tendency to rant and explain unnecessary details and minor digressions, but I’ll keep this first post brief.

I’m Feeling Creative