Goblin-in-the-rain - Meta

I rlly love your art! I like to draw too but I'm having trouble with chubby/fat characters. Is there any advice you could give? (Sorry if this is weird or annoying, if so you don't gotta answer it.)

I get this question a lot, and for once I’m going to try to give a proper answer. 

I what most people get wrong is how to distribute fat. People gain fat in different parts of their body, but no one gains fat in only one part. I often see people draw “fat” characters by just drawing a skinny character and making their belly stick out, like in the picture below.

as you can see, the first drawing  looks kinda weird and unnatural, and it certainly does not look “fat”. in the second drawing the fat distribution is more natural, with fat on the characters’ sides and chest as well as the belly. if you want to get better at drawing fat you should practice adding fat to those areas, as well as the arms, face and neck. another thing that makes the first one look strange is how “hard” the fat looks. there’s a really visible border between the “skinny” part of the body and the “fat” part. fat doesn’t work the same way as muscle. fat is soft and doesn’t have any strenght - meaning that unless you physically lift it up its going to hang and sag. a lot of people are afraid of drawing fat that looks fat - as in fat that bulges, sags and gathers in rolls. that is a shame, because you can’t really skip that stuff if you want to draw natural looking fat.

like you see in the drawing above, adding rolls and visible sagging makes the fat look, well, fatter. all I can say is; don’t be afraid of making your fat look like real fat!

Emerald moths to improve your day - 3: common emerald

Called common, but for me at least it's an infrequent visitor. Its caterpillars eat a similar range of shrubby plants and trees to the light emerald. They're also very good twig mimics and you can see in these photos by Kjeld Brem (find the originals here and here on Flickr)

Look at it's adorable little mush!

Such a good moth. I hope I get some more visit this year.

Bioregional Quiz

pink mushrooms

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.

My dad called my rat a “little friend” and I just found that important

Moth Of The Day #123

Blair's Mocha

Cyclophora puppillaria

From the geomtridae family. They have a wingspan of 28-36 mm. They tend to inhabit open and coastal habitats, but are also occasionally seen in woodland. They can be found in Europe and North Africa to the Caucasus area.

Hey Hector

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