DRAWING INSECTS: THE BASICS

Glen Southern demonstrates how to get started with macro insect sketches on the iPad, beginning with anatomy research

- Glen Southern

Insects and macro work in general is a popular subject for photographers, painters and even sculptors like myself. As a creature designer I get asked to create all kinds of insects and insect-inspired creatures. To produce really convincing concepts you need to know how a living thing works, and in the case of insects you have a number of advantages. Firstly, they all have the same basic body plan (roughly), so you only have to learn that once. Secondly, the reference material is all around you and you can get stunning reference images using just an iPhone these days.

For this type of project, I spend a lot of time researching the overall subject and then hone in on the actual species, in this case it was the humble bumblebee.

In this tutorial, I will focus on doing colour roughs to establish the basic look of the creature, and will also talk a little about basic insect anatomy – which, as I mentioned earlier, you only have to learn once as most insects have similar body plans, with a few modifications for their individual requirements.

Let’s start off by refreshing our knowledge on the basic body plan of a bee.

1 Basic anatomy – head, thorax and abdomen

An insect has very specific features that distinguish it from other invertebrate groups such as spiders, earthworms, sponges, jellyfish, lobsters, crabs, snails etc. The main features are: a hard outer skeleton (exoskeleton); they all have a threepart body made up of head, thorax, abdomen; six legs usually coming from the thorax; a pair of antennae; and if they have wings, most will have four. If the creature you are looking at has those characteristics, then you will most likely be dealing with an insect.