Weird Stimboard, But I Like It... :)

Weird stimboard, but I like it... :)

gifs of various pseudoscorpions

i went to a tiny counterserve diner once and accidentally poured sugar instead of salt all over my hashbrowns and was eating them sadly anyways. the waitress took them away and started making me another one and I tried to protest, but she just snorted and said "we're not catholic here". now every time i'm doing something painful out of obligation i think about how that is not repenting, this body is not a catholic establishment, there is no nobility in suffering.

The Incendiary Lumchagg

My response to this week’s BestiaryPosting challenge, from @maniculum

Pencil sketch, then lines TWSBI Eco fine nib fountain pen, using Diamine Tyrian Purple ink. (I just so happened to be using purple ink in my journaling pen this month, so given the description I felt it made sense to use this for the linework this week!)

Reasoning below the cut…

"The Lumchagg is a bird of Arabia, so called either because its colouring is purple, or because there is only one of its kind in the whole world. It lives for upwards of five hundred years, and when it observes that it has grown old, it erects a funeral pyre for itself from small branches of aromatic plants, and having turned to face the rays of the sun, beating its wings, it deliberately fans the flames for itself and is consumed in the fire. But on the ninth day after that, the bird rises from its own ashes.

The Lumchagg also is said to live in places in Arabia and to reach the great age of five hundred years. When it observes that the end of its life is at hand, it makes a container for itself out of frankincense and myrrh and other aromatic substances; when its time is come, it enters the covering and dies. From the fluid of its flesh a worm arises and gradually grows to maturity; when the appropriate time has come, it acquires wings to fly, and regains its previous appearance and form."

I'll be honest, this is one of those weeks that I didn't think too hard about, but rather to take what was given to us by the description in the bestiary, and concentrate on the composition of the piece. We don't have a lot to work on apart from 'bird' and 'worm' so I had a lot of freedom there; the bird's head, crest and beak was largely influenced by the hoopoe (mostly because they are wonderful birds, rather than any particularly logic), but the profile of the bird in flight was taken from flamingos 🦩 (mostly because there is a link there to the creature I suspect this prompt may be about…🤔). I tried a slightly faster sketch this time with a little less detail, trying to work out where the balance lies between definition and detail...

The worm itself was pretty simple, though I did take some influence from the art of Mike Mignola (though I'm not confident enough to try the super-heavy shading he does!), as were the orbs of flame above each of the creatures' heads.

The nest is a little messy, but one of the things I tried to do here was make sure the branches were recognisably from the Commiphora and Boswellia plants (source of myrrh and frankincence, respectively).

Today for Mermay I mermified Apollo's Dodgeball. My thanks to @theforceisstronginthegirl for suggesting the pufferfish; according to wikipedia, dolphins poke those things to get high, which just makes it even more fitting because the Oracle at Delphi (priestess of Apollo) would inhale fumes to get in a trance state, and "Delphi" and "dolphin" sound similar.

My progress thread for this piece can be found here.

The Lascivious Rabyeang

My response to this week’s BestiaryPosting challenge, from @maniculum

Pencil sketch, then lines in Sailor fude nib fountain pen, using Diamine Sepia ink.

Have a bonus drawing of a Rabyeang and a lamprey getting ready to hook up ;)

Thought process under the cut…

"The Rabyeang is so called because the female gives birth with force. For when her belly aches with labour pains, her young do not wait to be released at the right time according to nature, but gnawing through her sides burst forth, leaving their mother dead. They say that the male spits his seed into the female, with his head inserted in her mouth. Mad with lust she bites it off. Thus it comes about that both parents die; the male during intercourse; the female at birth. Saint Ambrose says of the Rabyeang that it is the vilest kind of creature and more cunning than the whole [redacted] species. When it feels the desire for intercourse, it goes in search of a lamprey already known to it or prepares to copulate with a new partner. It goes to the shore and makes its presence known with a hiss, inviting her to its conjugal embrace. The lamprey, once invited, does not demur and shares with the poisonous Rabyeang the union it seeks. [This is spun into a lengthy misogynistic metaphor.] The female Rabyeang searches for her absent male, enticing him with a seductive hiss, and when she senses that he is approaching, she spits out her poison, modestly showing reverence to her husband and the obligations of marriage. For they say that after the task of mating is over, the Rabyeang sucks up the poison that it had spat out beforehand."

I went back and forth about what to do with this prompt; I didn't really fancy the idea of drawing the babies being born, and clearly the authors have a weird bee in their bonnet about sex, plus everything else going on here...

Regarding what manner of creature this is, given the poison, the hissing, and the authors weird attitude towards this creature all make me think that this is a Serpent of some kind 🐍.

Given that some snakes are viviparous or ovoviviparous, it might be a misunderstanding of a snake giving live birth that led to the section about how the Rabyeang gives birth... 🤔

We didn't have a great deal else to go on, so I figured we make the Rabyeang a viperid snake, modelled after the adder (the only venomous snake where I live). To add a little visual interest, I figured I might depict a pair of Rabyeans in flagrante delicto, including the male sticking its head in the female's mouth...

This was actually inspired by a time I visited a wildlife park which had a mated (and mating...!) pair of adders on display, which was weird but also pretty cool.

As an aside, did you know that Henry I of England died after eating a surfeit of lampreys...?

I'd love to hear more about what makes the wings of the stylops so unique! Wings are always fascinating to me

Almost all insects with wings normally have four of them, except that in beetles, the front wings became the shields we call Elytra:

And in the true flies (diptera), the HIND wings became little vibrating knobs we call halteres, which are organic gyroscopes for collecting information about air pressure, direction and elevation, easiest to see on larger flies like this crane fly:

So, the male Strepsiptera is actually the only insect other than flies to have evolved halteres, but the Strepsiptera's halteres are evolved from the FRONT wings:

Their hind wings are odd enough too; simple "fans" unlike the intricately veined wings of other insects, but still not as unusual as forewing halteres. It's thought to be convergent evolution, and that they may have once been elytra like the beetles have. A connection to beetles is also suggested by the fact that a few beetle groups have larvae very similar to those of the strepsipterans, which look like this:

Lovably nasty larvae! They jump, and they're all spiny, and they actually use an acid secretion to melt their way into their first host.

There's one other insect group that incidentally evolved elytra shields, earwigs!

But earwigs can't be ancestral to either beetles or strepsiptera, because earwigs don't go through a larval stage, which the big evolutionary divide for insects; all the insects with larvae are thought to have just one common ancestor, splitting off from the other insects fairly early.