Blight And Herring.

Blight and Herring.

Both these guys have several different descriptions that still all get the main gist of their characters!

Blight

The main feature defining his appearance gave him his namesake. Splattered thoughtlessly across his pale, otherwise nondescript, variously gradient lime scales, are splotches of purple-brown ringed in yellow, most notably dotting his wings, snout and talons.

A pensive, mildly arrogant LeafWing professor with a painless but harmful disorder, typically lethal to males, that leaves brown stains on his scales and chips away at his membranes, shooting his wings through with pinpricks and holes, is Blight. A biology nerd specializing in entomology and botany, he works at the LeafWing Institute of Education, likes tea, salads, philosophy and spending time in dark libraries, and owns a loyal pet sun beetle named Pachnoda (whom he carries around daily on his shoulders or horns). He can be described as thoughtful, a bit melancholy, leaning sometimes off to the indifferent side and sometimes rather haughty.

While he isn't particularly friendly, he sees no time wasted in teaching someone about something he loves.

Herring

His scales are a light gray-blue, with dark overscales and dapples across his back. His horns are a dull gradient, from blue at the base to green to orange, shimmering like washed rainbow shells and bearing a resemblance to his similarly-blended wings and webs, offering many positive comments from those who stare into them. He has conch-pink underscales, and pale peach bioluminescent stripes.

A writer and a minor noble, Herring is a melancholy SeaWing honing his craft in a studio on the coastline of Pyrrhia. He enjoys long walks, hot water, serene days at the beach, and fancy gatherings (in which he, sometimes, may or may not have a bit too much to drink). His preference for air rather than sea does set him apart from the other ocean-dwelling dragons, but made pursuing his current career quite a bit easier. While living above-water, he travels to spend much of his time at events in the rebuilt Summer and Island Palaces and long-standing Deep Palace, partying amongst the other aristocrats.

He makes a good partner for conversation whatever his mood.

They met through a strange (and beautiful, they both agreed) dragon, somehow-mutual friend, Nephrite, suggesting they find each other.

oh boy I am memorizing Too Many Species Right Now!! Most of them are because I have bug characters

Here is all of the information I can gather directly from my mind right now:

(mentions of lots of arthropods and a cnidarian under the readmore!)

Sphecius convallis - the pacific cicada killer wasp, closely related to but not to be confused with the more well-known eastern cicada killer, in the same genus with the species name speciosus. It's a tannish-orange color with yellow and off white markings, primarily on its face and abdomen.

Parides montezuma - Montezuma's cattleheart, a black butterfly with bright red markings on the tips of its forewings and on its abdomen, grayish stripes also marking the latter.

Dynastes tityus - the eastern hercules beetle, one of the horned beetles in a dull greenish-yellow, with black freckles on the elytra, as well as a black elytral/prothoracal "margin", prothoracal horn and head. It has tan fur on the undersides of said horn, as well as thorax and abdomen. As with most (all?) horned beetles the horn is only present in males.

Apis mellifera - way too prevalent for me to forget ever, the western/european honeybee. This is the bee that is normally and widely domesticated for honey. It has a light brown head and thorax and (in workers) a yellowish and dark brown banded abdomen, and is one of the rare social species of bees. While western honeybee numbers are in fact decreasing, they aren't close to extinction and are competing with native bees, who ARE indeed endangered.

Polistes olivaceus - commonly referred to as the yellow paper wasp, yellow oriental paper wasp or Macao paper wasp. Yellow, with thin and numerous tan, brown or black bands all along its body.

Sphex pensylvanicus - the great black wasp, or great black digger wasp. It's pretty notable for being all-black with metallic, dark blue wings, and was probably first examined in Pensylvania, U.S. considering the species name but can be found in several places that are Not There in the country. I found a dead one on the side of the road and I put her in my house

Tachypompilus ferrugineus - The rusty spider wasp. It's one that preys on spiders (several? only one?), dragging it (them?) back to her nest to lay eggs on. I've already nerded out about this for a reason, because seeing a red wasp with metallic blue wings drag a wolf spider 2x her size across your front lawn into a hole of unknown depth is a memorable experience.

Polydrusus impressifrons - A weevil. It's sort of pale lime green, sparkling with yellows and darker greens in the elytra chitin, which notably to me is not smooth but rather has straight thin "valley"s carved through it from end to end? I'm sure there's a better word for it but I can't currently remember.

Pleurobrachia pileus - A jellyfish called a sea gooseberry along with the other member of its genus. ...It looks like a drop of water.

Myrmecocystus mexicanus - An ant in one of the genuses holding those known as honeypot ants, but it's not really said if the species itself is in fact one with modified honeypot workers, so I assume it probably isn't? Workers are a light golden-tan, with the head being a bit darker.

Cranjon cranjon - It's a thin light brown shrimp, that iirc is often caught for food. I just think the name is cool

Vespula maculifrons/germanica/vulgaris - three very similar-looking species of yellowjacket in the same genus, the former called the eastern yellowjacket and both the latter called european yellowjackets, though germanica is also called the german wasp while vulgaris is called the common wasp. They're basically what the average person thinks of when hearing the word wasp, with striking bands of black and yellow. They construct papery nests despite not being part of Polistes, and I can't exactly remember their differences currently? There's a tree in my area they were all swarming around about a week ago and I fed them italian ice before one was carried away and eaten mid-flight by a larger bald-faced hornet. Fun times.

I can't remember the scientific name of this one, but it is most commonly referred to as Avispa de caballo (Horse's wasp, not to be confused with horse guard wasp) and it bears close resemblance to cicada killers, due to them both being sand wasps.

Megaloblatta longipennis - one of, if not, the largest species of cockroach. I don't know why I remember this?

Lampyris noctiluca - a species of lampyrid beetle, of which is otherwise known as a firefly or lightning bug, or a glowworm for the larvae and the larviform adult females. The species is one of the most commonly seen fireflies, I believe?

Coenagrion puella - a damselfly species. The male imagos are blue, while the females are green or brown, and both have black abdominal bands and thoracic stripes. It's one of the species that folds its forelegs up near its head.

Strategus aloeus - the ox beetle. It's chestnut brown, with the males having one long forward-facing prothoracic horn and two smaller ones facing back. It doesn't have haired elytra like Pygopleurus, but the underside sure is fluffy!

And that's not even counting all the times I nerded out while writing this, like about how cockroaches are actually most related to termites and that taxon is the sister group of mantises, or how brush-footed butterflies (including monarchs!) do the same thing (as puella) with their reduced forelegs tucked up behind their head so they stand on fours, or how odonates have such large eyes and great vision that they catch their prey 90% of the time, being the most successful hunters, and can predict said prey's movement. Or counting the many nudibranchs I remember the appearances, but not the names, of in vivid detail

Anyway. Uh. Writing this felt way shorter than the time it took. Goodbye

*claps hands together, accidentally smushing a mosquito but it's ok because the mosquito was a jerk anyway* gay dragons

Angler and Magma are, too, some of my older and closer-to-my-heart OCs and here they are!

Anglerfish is a SilkWing/SeaWing whose mother kindofdrownedherfatherandleftheratthebottomoftheocean. Not too strange for Wings of Fire parents, though, amiright?

She roamed the depths of the seafloor figuring herself out for a while before deciding to take a risk and find purpose in her life, discovering the surface is super hot and weird and bright, not helping much that she stumbled onto a volcano isle with a stranger who didn't understand her at all.

Magmacore was aptly named for her seething bright insides. After her parents both, collectively, abandoned her, no murder involved, for seeing her winglessness as a mistake, Magma survived only a few days before she found herself heavily wounded in what she thought would be an anti climactic end to her lifetime. There is strange magic in the isle though, and blood spilled incited, interestingly enough, the life-fluids in her core to transmute into boiling lava.

She spent the rest of her life living alone on the sands, hostile to any who wandered near, until a strange pale dragon swept to shore.

There's another fullbody image of Magma, but it's disproportionate and I'll fix it later

cordycat! cordycat!

I was looking through a lot of the posts of @lagt-duck because (hollow knight! undertale! spiritfarer! slime rancher!) and noticed they had, on several occasions, drawn and designed mushrooms. so I thought. mushrooms!

They had designed sort of humanoid fungal creatures, but I, in my love of biology and interestingly, entomology, realized there was an actual way fungi locomote. and that's by infecting bugs and using their undead bodies as hosts! Luckily, fungi like cordyceps can't actually control larger beings/vertebrates like humans and cats (though I'm not sure where the line blurs?)

The cat host is very much dead and Tan is the cordyceps within--not usually smug, but who wouldn't boast after finding a new body to move around in that's like, 28154x the size of your friends?

(They haven't...really...figured out expressions yet)

This is actually the first piece so far that's recent, since I have a lot of art to catch up to!

I FINALLY DEFEATED THE RADIANCE oh my gods

Oh wait I just remembered this exists. Now in two terrible versions!

(greatly inspired by this meme of hk characters eating kitkats... link)