BUG SKIN

Art is tagged under “My Artwork”, look at my pretty drawings or else. I’m a lady who likes bugs and cool outfits and bugs in cool outfits, I’m an adult and I’ve been one for a long time

[bug-skin]

A Yellow Garden Spider. They’re known for making webs with these funky zig-zag patterns down the middle.

[big-bad-ron]

[natoraptor]

“Tour Guides”

-2026

[canismajorly]

she would have been so famous on myspace

[leninthesixth]

think about this every time i watch videos about youtuber drama

[cedar-rayne]

✧ chum salmon ✧

available in my shop!

june 2026.

[cedar-rayne]

✧ sturgeon ✧

sneak peak of a new sculpture coming to my shop! this is the underglaze painting before the clear glaze is applied.

[ljesak]

[doberbutts]

Laying on the floor to read my book and suddenly I've attracted all the beasts

[crow-keys]

I finally beat them the other day and wanted to celebrate with a sketch page

[zephyrbug]

Art Fight attack for averyteenybird (on Art Fight) of their character Berry Clearwater!! She’s a mighty dragon that runs a smoothie shop🌱🌅🦋

[ribbed9]

no pain❤️‍🔥

[ritasanderson]

[huecycles]

friendly fire for @marnielovesyouu STARLITE 🌠

[throathole]

Women with big curly red hair always have like 12 gay guy friends why is that

[throathole]

INCREDIBLE response

[bug-skin]

After endless hours of pestering my friends to help me choose between the dozens of color scheme samples I sent them, I have finally finished my Indian Lily Moth. He's feeling groovy.

[jayrockin]

Almost Real's POP CULTURE issue is live on Kickstarter! Time to introduce the cute yet vaguely horrible cover critter, a living gachapon toy bioengineered by scud aliens!

The wild gachapede is a segmented worm-like arthropoid that lives parasitically inside a bivalve-like "giant diatom" in shallow, sandy-bottomed seas of the scud homeplanet. The giant diatom's shell is made of two interlocking lid-like frustules of transparent silica, allowing light to pass through to its veins of symbiotic unicellular algae. Much like the microscopic diatoms of earth, giant diatoms reproduce in two different ways, asexually and sexually. Asexual reproduction is carried out by the two frustules separating and each generating a new frustule, a phase during which they may be parasitized by the gachapede. But because the new frustule is always smaller than the old one, like the lid and body of a box, eventually one lineage of giant diatoms is too small to safely carry out asexual reproduction. These tiny ones will finally give up and reproduce sexually by releasing sperm and eggs that will join to create new larvae and maximum-size giant diatoms. The parasitic gachapede has a relatively low impact on a large healthy giant diatom, as it lays dormant until the frustules split, surviving off the "bloodstream" of unicellular algae.

Scuds have used the unique properties of these two organisms in combination with their civilization's advanced biotech to create a collectable toy; twisting the basic bodyplan of the gachapede into thousands of variations of "funny little guys." The wild diatom has been modified into a "gachapod," which is far more spacious and transparent than its wild counterpart. To obtain the toy, you crack open the two frustles and recycle the gachapod (which will now grow into two new pods). However, once removed from its food source, the gachapede typically only lives a couple days at most. At the end of its life, its cuticle calcifies and makes them into a rigid figurine. Scuds who are really into the gachapede scene will pose their gachapede into a desirable pose like a insect collector pinning a bug.

Anyways, if you want to read about even more strange, horrifying, and fascinating intersections of biology and pop culture, check out Almost Real: A Speculative Biology Zine. We've also got a big thick book of the previous issues with different themes, including Mythology, Biotechnology, Aquatics, and Flight.