#imaginary bugs

Tonight I decided to draw a moth again. But this time it's an imaginary one, based on my Synesthesia when I think about the french name Julien.

Julien is like orange soda, like a whirlpool, splashes or water, whipped cream (especially the texture and the noise it makes when coming out of the bottle). It's orange and deep forest green, with some off-white.

It's super hard to transcribe exactly what I have in mind, but it's just inspired by it, not an accurate representation of course 😊

Roll for bugs #1 and #2

Now that Mothtober has ended, I'd like to improve my skills in drawing from imagination + more dynamic drawings and explore styles.

So I launched a Roll for bugs serie. I let coins, dice and wheels decide what kind of bugs I should draw.

The first roll was:

Imaginary bug

2 pairs of legs

3 pairs of eyes

more than 3 pairs of wings

1 color only : purple

smooth texture

inspired by a country: Azerbaidjan

Not super happy with the end result but that's the first time i'm drawing something that doesn't exist, in years. That's only the beginning !

The second roll:

Imaginary bug

more than 4 pairs of legs

4 pairs of eyes

3 pairs of wings

5 colors: brown, orange, green, blue, and black

shiny texture (ended up not so shiny :/ )

inspired by "Ask partner": he said Capybara ✨

And that's how we got the Caterpybara!

What do you think of them?

UK-based illustrator Richard Wilkinson (previously) imagines new insect species inspired by familiar faces from popular culture. Two of his more recent series cover both ends of a fantastical spectrum, with bugs designed after horror movie villains and children’s cartoon characters.

For his horror icons Family: Timorpersonae collection, Wilkinson pays homage to classic slashers and newer terrors including Jason Voorhees, Pennywise the Clown, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the demon Valak. For each insect’s zoological nomenclature, Wilkinson creates a Latin phrase that serves as a description of the character or their respective film. For example, his Freddy Krueger “A Nightmare on Elm Street” piece is titled Insomnium ulmusvicus: insomnium from the Latin insomnis (sleep), ulmus (street), and vicus (elm).

For his Family: Insanusmelodiae series, Wilkinson incorporated the faces of iconic Looney Tunes characters into the bodies of beetles and bugs who inherited unfortunate but funny traits from their cartoon counterparts. “Their distinctive characteristics include loud and often odd vocalizations and the very distinctive fast and erratic movements,” the artist wrote in a statement. He added that the “most peculiar aspect of the Insanusmelodiae’s behaviour is their clumsiness. They often meet their end under a falling stone or twig, or after falling from a long drop. Their wings, also vestigial, can produce enough uplift to keep them in the air for a moment or two before they fall.”

It’s easy to imagine these incredibly life-like renderings truly existing as creatures crawling on a planet far away, and each is given a cheeky scientific name with Latin roots that relate to its sci-fi counterpart like Roboduobus Deoduobus for R2D2 or Chaetebarbatus Bonamicii for Chewbacca.