bugs and monsters, eyes and teeth

Entomologist. I also draw shit.

[bowelfly]

hello, i've decided to make a pinned post after like 7 years on this site. i'm a professional entomologist but spend most of my free time drawing. i picked this username while drunk many years ago and now i'm committed i guess. i usually go by ascalaphid elsewhere

tags i have tags for art and photos. i sometimes do pixel art or craft dolls and figurines. a lot of my art is of my character trungo or other bug people. i occasionally talk about movies

commissions i’m not doing high or even medium effort commissions anymore but i am always taking $5 bug doodle commissions on ko-fi

other accounts @cnestus is where i post bug photos @bowelflies is where i reblog stuff i like

other places to find me:

personal website ko-fi (selling stickers on here now!) INPRNT redbubble letterboxd artfight bsky

[bowelfly]

Is it safe to assume Pride Month is well celebrated in the abbey?

happy pride monk everyone

(stole that joke from @voskhodart)

[bowelfly]

hi! i just want to say i’m so glad i came across your monastic menagerie series. i am delighted every time i see anything from it. it’s really encouraging me to just relax and have fun with my own art! thank you for sharing your work!

That's great to hear!

I'll be honest this was a complete accident of a project, just sort of randomly snowballed out of nowhere from a handful of drawings a couple years ago but it's been great for me as an artist and also just like for my mental health I think.

Particularly this year I've been Going Through It as I'm sure just about everyone else has but I was really giving myself some heavy brain damage and probably an ulcer from reading too much news and I guess just as a means of self-preservation I've now basically structured all of my free time around drawing funny little animal guys because they're easy to draw and fun to think about and my unnecessary Bad News intake's gone way down over the last couple months.

I've got a whole assembly line process now with my drawing that might be interesting enough to make a post about sometime but in any case I just updated my gallery and it turns out I did more art this month than the entirety of 2024, at least depending on how you quantify it.

So yeah, I highly encourage you and everyone else to have fun drawing and hopefully if you haven't already you'll find or develop your own equivalent of the monastic menagerie to get obsessed with (do people still call it blorbos? idk I'm almost 40 and don't need to know these things)

[bowelfly]

Brother Cedric

[leveragehunters]

@bowelfly thought you might enjoy the needle felted weasel monk I made a few years ago

Perhaps one of Brother Cedric's fancy relatives!

[bowelfly]

hands you a bunch of little guys

[bowelfly]

beep beep picklecar

[bigmsaxon]

A shrewsie, my answer to @bowelfly's call for more shrewnanigans.

[bowelfly]

slow shrews day is going to become part of my lexicon from now on

(for context, i made a joke post on bluesky that inspired a deluge of extremely fun shrew art in the replies & reblogs)

[bowelfly]

once again sister dot got distracted from whatever she was supposed to fix getting into a joke-off with a couple mirthful shrews

[floridensis]

visited a home with a telephone pole beetle (Micromalthus debilis) infestation today. i was able to collect an unbelievable number of adults, which will be sent to various insect collections. i dont really have words for how mind boggling this is

Telephone-pole beetle - Wikipedia

Telephone-pole beetle - Wikipedia

[bowelfly]

oh lol this person apparently commented on my own telephone beelte photo on inat a few days ago and i just saw it

[bowelfly]

gesundheit

[bowelfly]

Hey! I thought you'd enjoy hearing that there's a monastery in the city I grew up, and they raise egg-laying chickens. Everyone knows they're the best eggs in town even though they cost a little bit more because the monks hug the chooks and they're so relaxed, running around a garden that's full of plants for them. Their eggs are so yellow and rich. I think your monks are tending aphids for their little yellow eggs, too. Anyway, my atheist ass still loved that place growing up. If religion was just hugging animals, I'd be all over that.

That's lovely and adorable. I also really wish there secular monasteries where you could just live in and raise chickens and not have to worry about having a real job or paying rent or whatever.

few more asks under the cut:

@a-random-fandom-friend I hope you don't mind but I'm just gonna refer you to a similar ask from a few days ago. but yeah fundamentally I just really like the look of franciscan-ish habits and it's fun to draw little animals in them.

I think every monastery should have a mascot animal they put a little custom habit on

love it. you should write that fanfic.

[bowelfly]

Sister Dot trades jokes with one of the shrew brothers

[bowelfly]

the risk we accept by putting our art out there for the world to see is sometimes it escapes confinement and a christian pro-life blog finds it and thinks its part of the zootopia abortion comic extended universe or whatever and then we block them because that's also a thing we can do

[bowelfly]

thank god its flyday

[solice]

Doodling on company time as god intended

[gachimushi]

How did I get here?

[bowelfly]

Hey, bowelfly! I was wondering if you had ever watched "The Secret World of Arrietty"? The size difference between her and the bugs kinda reminds me of the ratios of your monks. (She can handle potato bugs like a lapdog, and crickets are like Irish wolfhounds.) Do your guys keep anything as pets? Minnows as...fish, or fuzzy caterpillars as cats?) Thanks for posting so much, by the way! It really gives me something to look forward to (but please take breaks when necessary, and remember to stretch your arms/hands/wrists regularly!). Have a great day! 🌻

I gotta be honest I always found that to be one of Miyazaki's duller works, which is a shame because the premise is fun and there's some great imagery in it, but the story just kinda left me cold the couple times i saw it.

There is one canonical bug pet so far, Brother Mo, which Sister Dot & Sister Helga take care of and dress up in a little habit for fun, friar moustache style

outside of that though I'm pretty inconsistent with the size of bugs relative to the size of the critters. I've always had a real "measure none, cut however many times you feel" approach to drawing.

never drawn them together but by the transitive property Brother Gregor the gharial would probably be only a bit bigger than one of the abbey's draft beetles

[bowelfly]

Important notes from today's lab meeting