The Bestiary

I consider what I am doing to be art

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Added a background to this

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Pink katydid!

I'm not done with it; I figured I might as well scan and upload just the bug before adding the background though, in case something goes wrong

These occur in nature; it's a mutation called erythrism and lots of different kinds of organisms can have it

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Musk thistle rosette - this is 9" x 9", and my scanner is maybe a hair over 8.5" wide, so part of it has been cut off.

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This is very small in person; I'm sending it to my aunt as a Christmas card

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My 2023 retrospective is probably the smallest yet -- I did not do much this year! I'm really proud of the citrus root weevil on the left though, I think he's an all-time favorite.

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It's not October anymore, but if you look at that background you will see what took me so long with this one.

Invertober 5, citrus root weevil

(A pity there is only one of him)

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Invertober 3 - little fire ant

Referenced from this photo by Alex Wild

Prompt list by FossilForager on Twitter

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Here's a version I scanned at 45% contrast. I'm not sure which one I like better.

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Doing that diving beetle a few days ago made me want to practice this bubble technique a little more. What's really tricky is doing the background fast enough that it can all flow together, and not have parts where it dried and there's a border between regions. You can see I wasn't entirely successful in avoiding that; there's a little square of obviously darker blue near the bottom there, behind the lower rightmost bubble.

The more diffuse regions of darker color are intentional; they're there to disguise messy bubble outlines.

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Invertober 1 - sunburst diving beetle

This was going great right up until all the blue-green paint in the background ran all over his legs. One leg I could more or less salvage, but there was one on the opposite side of his body that got totally obliterated so I had to just cover it up. Sad!

The bubbles represent a new technique for me though and I really like them.

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We had an unusual amount of rain this summer and it brought some green leaves down; these had a really interesting color that I'm not sure came through here, it was like a medium to dark green with a reddish brown undertone. I tried to capture it with a mix of sap green, burnt sienna and viridian.

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2022 retrospective -- there's more here than I thought there would be

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White snakeroot leaf with super dramatic yellow veins on one side

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Made a pixel art version of this painting using this app

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I'm doing leaves for the foreseeable future but I do intend to make "Put That Beast in an Environment" a series of paintings

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Second of the 3 leaves my mom found for me -- I have already posted the first.

This took me a very long time because I painted it twice; it took me until finishing the first attempt to see that it wasn't Good(TM). This is the second attempt.

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