Sunday Sketchbook

Over the last few months, I found myself diving into maybe too many pursuits that have both energized and exhausted me. My adventures included several travels for conferences, which took me overseas and across the country, immersing myself in diverse professional landscapes and meeting incredible minds in Science, Design, Journalism, Cartography and a little touch of unexpected militaries. At the same time, my commitments at the Society have kept my schedule packed along with other colleagues to drive our goals forward. Work has been busier too.

Amidst all this, I’ve also nurtured a personal obsession: the promise I made to myself to pursue and achieve formal FAA accreditation for flying drones commercially. That last one was especially fun!

But perhaps you’re wondering what all that has to do with bug or with inspiration for illustration? –Well, it’s all about fly, the joy of adventure for many different things all at once, almost like a mad scientist having way too much fun. Last time I checked, I didn’t have wasp antennae on my head… phew. But here I am, this week inspiration comes looking at my last couple of months going crazy here and there, mixing up science, flying machines and the consistent obsession with insects.

I’m glad to have this space to go crazy, maybe too crazy.

If you are not as crazy, I encourage you to forget about formalities for a bit, and the mold our lives are supposed to fit into. I don’t know if I’ll sprout antennae from filling up my free time with bugs—I certainly hope not—though if it gave me the power of empathy like Mantis, maybe I’d be happy to have them.

Thanks for reading, see you soon with more nonsense related to bugs and illustration.

🪳

Holy crab!

Sometimes I spend some time looking at collaborative networks and how people works together for a common goal. One of those is iNaturalist, which is a platform to identify plants and animals in a contribution to a broader community of science observers.

Just a few days ago, for no particular reason, I was looking at data on iNaturalist about crabs; I don’t recall ever drawing one as a main character before—they aren’t really “bugs,” even if they might look like them in a way.

But don’t think I’m going into nerd mode today.

In fact, here’s an illo from a fictional story—featuring a fictional animal and something that doesn’t exist… even if, in a way, it seems familiar.

In a kingdom far, far away, the Crab King decided to have all the trumpets in the kingdom painted blue. Some were very happy with the idea. Because blue makes everything just better.

Others have to blow their sad trumpets and carry on, simply because they live paycheck to paycheck. They would wish for King Crab to give them more bread instead of blue trumpets.

Among other things, the Crab King is obsessed with certain shades of his shell and also has a dependency on cupcakes. Fortunately, many old followers with power in the kingdom provide him with all the pastries he wants.

And so, they lived out their blue lives together for many more years in the Crab King’s kingdom.

Thanks for reading this wacky story; I really appreciate you taking the time for this. See you in a few days—Happy Father’s Day!

A boat trip.

A combination of personal commitments and professional events have taken me away from my sketching blog for a while, but finally, I made it back. And it’s not a complaint at all; I had time to bring to reality a mentorship for students that I have been working on for years, I went to a conference, led some workshops, traveled to a few places to meet awesome people, and enjoyed a few days with my parents here in the city… really a lot of great stuff.

Actually, I took my parents on a short trip on the ferry through the East River on a sunny day and totally forgot about these warehouses in Brooklyn. The moment the boat stopped at the old navy yard, I saw a giant beetle taking off from the platform. But check the cranes in the back too, it’s truly and inspirational lovely scene.

I love when imagination just flyaway, I totally understand that my sketches are far from perfect, but times of AI, those imperfections are added value and the whole point about my Sunday Sketchbook project is to have a escape from reality. So here I’m, dreaming of a shipyard where giant beetles can take off.

I really like to explore color variations; sometimes, removing colors provides a richer contrast. Below there’s an alternative version in full color to explain myself a little better, which one you prefer?

Thanks for visiting my blog, see you next week for more bugs.

Movement, wind and dust.

Today’s bug is really a mix between the Ants project that mentioned before here and the wonderful legacy of Moebius.

I first discovered the art of Jean Henri Gaston Giraud [ Moebius ] thanks to my friend Daniel Solano, a very talented artist in his own right. Since then, the art of that French artist has become an inspiration and a point of reference for me. Now, even when I see abstract forms, I somehow connect images of imaginary worlds with those references that made such a strong impression on me years ago.

So here I am, looking at a digital scan of an ant:

The posture itself is so strange—almost as if this ant were running, frozen in a snapshot right at the finish line of an Olympic race… But you may remember from day 106 when I talked about the AntScan project that the original animal was frozen in time, just as it died, in a glass vial.

However, looks so dynamic, do you think?

It brought to my mind the scenes drawn by Moebius with weird creatures running at full gallop while the rider can feel the gentle touch of the wind on its face.

So here’s my version of specimen 0242:

I hope you are having a great weekend, thanks for reading/watching. See you next week to explore the sources of inspiration that await us everywhere.

Fake eight-legged zombies.

Back in March I read this article about an Ecuadorian spider that mimics the infection of a Gibellula fungus, also known as the zombie fungus because it takes over control of insects body forcing them to climb and find the best spot to anchor it host firmly before the bloom of the fungi to best release spores. Sounds like a plot of a horror movie of an alien-like agent infecting creatures.

But why would a creature want to imitate such a terrible outcome?

Researches have reported seen ants carrying infected fellows as faraway as they can before the fungus bloom to prevent a the extermination of their colony. The Gibellula takes over ants, grasshoppers, spiders or any insect that gets in contact with the spores… But this spider saw an opportunity in the fear.

The finding was registered by Dr. Gustavo Hormiga, an arachnologist (spider researcher) and professor at George Washington University. Despite his name, Dr. Hormiga (translates to “Doctor Ant” in Spanish), has dedicated his career to studying spiders rather than insects.

Dr. Hormiga explained in the article that those spiders might have developed that terrifying technique of mimicking zombie fungi as an advantage to allow the, to get get close to the prey before attaching. This because once the fungus blooms, the insect becomes just a dead shell.

Crazy (or very clever) amazonian spiders wearing fungus hats! 🤯

Have fun, enjoy your weekend, and watch out for zombies!

See you next week!

The laundry world.

There are many tv shows and movies with scenes happening in or around laundries. I guess that’s part of the U.S. culture exported to the world through films.

In fact, that was one of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around when I moved to the United States a few years ago—I mean, why can’t we have a washing machine at home, just like we do in practically every other part of the world?

Now you are wondering, and that what has to do with your bugs blog?… well, while at the laundry shop, I listen to music, or read a book or something to pass the time while I wait for the clothes to stop spinning.

People walk past in front of rows of machines with those iconic round lids; the dryers are stacked one atop another, and after staring at them for a while, you start to let your imagination run wild.

What do you see in that photo?

I don’t know about you, but my imagination said it was a gigantic spider watching—without moving—the people crossing back and forth.

I guess people is always immersed on its own world so they just skip the gigantic things around them. I really enjoy little details of things, what do you think, are you an admirer of details, or do you skip over things because you live with a laser focus?

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Did you saw the pigeon in the main illustration?

If you want to be queen, you don’t hold your breath.

Here’s one more fun story from Trilobites. Scientists have made an interesting discovery about bumblebees: it turns out that they appear to be able to breathe even when completely submerged. A pretty good way to survive flooding as they emerge from a hibernation-like phase every winter.

It’s actually no small feat; these insects can spend months in a state of reduced activity. This simply blew my mind—I had always wondered how these buddies survived the winter, and the answer turned out to be even more creative than I could have imagined.

Imagine what it would be like to stumble upon a bumblebee—Nautilus-style—with the divers connected to long breathing hoses… and there, peacefully, right in the midst of it all… boom! you find this magnificent creature that has discovered a different way to keep breathing while it waits to take flight once spring arrives.

Thanks for visiting my blog.

I hope to see you again next week with another fun story about a cool insect and how it inspired me to create one more doodle.

A Dutch book from 18th century.

Sometimes you don’t even need to understand everything to consider it inspiring or fascinating. If you speak dutch, maybe this would be easy, I truly made an effort to get a little context of what I was seeing but neither Google Translate nor I could quite make out what the pages of Maria Sibylla’s book is properly describing.

But don’t take me wrong, but even if you get a vague sense of the pages and its descriptions, it is simply fascinating. Give it a try and see what I mean.

Some of the passages, like the one above, introduce the illustration plates. They appear to be a field journal containing observations that lend meaning to the illustrations in the following pages. These books are somewhat like silent films, where you would see a text vignette displaying the dialogue, followed by the action.

Here’s an sample I got from google translate on the first lines:

The hanging green caterpillar also eats roofs. This creature often pecks at its back and lets itself go up and down on a little thread that comes out of its mouth. On the tenth of May it became a pupa, and on the eighteenth a black fly.

You can get a vague idea of the descriptions, sure; but it’s obvious that the image-to-text reader was not working smoothly as expected. Google’s translation continued:

I also depicted your uppermost brown caterpillar feeding on oak leaves, from May 20th, 1684, until June 6th, when it changed into a dark red color. On the ninth of June, it spun a cocoon, within which it transformed into a pupa; and on the twenty-ninth of the same month, a small moth emerged—precisely like the one seen atop the caterpillar.

The book is filled with beautiful botanical and bug illustrations, here’s a small one that I really liked:

While I was contemplating these pages, I find myself trying to connect with something familiar—something I may have seen before. But this connection isn’t necessarily tied to the specific subject I’m observing.

Maybe it’s easier for our brain to connect with something more vague—perhaps a resemblance in the colors of something I once saw, or in the shapes or postures.

That green bug above called a memory of a popular illustration of a horse (or actually a dragon) that I first saw it on a bottle. There are many paintings with similar poses where horses extend their legs almost as if to fly over obstacles. Here’s what showed up into my head:

Maybe I’m just poorly wired; somewhere in the recesses of my memory, there was a horse with its legs extended—and right in the middle of searching for references, my mind said: “That’s it! This one.”

But what did you think when you saw that first image? I suppose there’s a good chance it wasn’t the same thing I saw.

Our experiences affect how we view things. We are influenced by things we find interesting in our life journey—we store them away to reference later.

On Sundays, I simply sit back and see where the stylus takes me.

I hope you enjoyed this post; I’ll see you next week to tell you more about another one of my mind’s wanderings, conspiring with the stylus of my Wacom.

The Times Trilobites.

The inspiration for this week’s illo came from this article, which talks about a project that scanned ants to recreate their internal and external structures—very similarly to how a CT scan does, they call it Antscan.

The project generated a database of +2000 specimens of dead ants resting inside glass vials in strange poses. As you can imagine, some of these scans immediately captivated my attention. One of the first I bookmarked was specimen 721 because under the scanner, 721 looks almost like an alien creature to me.

In addition to the inside slices of each ante, in Antscan you can also preview the ant in 3D, look at 721 here.

Specimen 721 is a Dilobocondyla fouqueti ant, these folks are mostly found in Vietnam and China wiki says. In real life they have a sort of hairs and don’t actually look like some hybrid mix of an ant and a peanut, but still you can see a little of this crazy texture on them.

But beyond my fascination with this Asian ant, my mental references immediately placed 721 in the same family of species as Ben Grimm, The Thing.

I’m happy to be back on illustration mode every Sunday. If you are curios about my process, I usually do doodles for poses, then an outline layers, then the color, and finally shadows and light. Here is a version with outline + light:

Thanks for visiting my blog; come back next week to read about a new source of inspiration I stumbled upon for creating another illustration.
I hope you have a fantastic weekend!