more Philippines-related art

This is a crappy jpeg file of a 11 x 14.25 inch poster I made. Have discovered that working with layered images eats memory like Cookie Monster eats Chips Ahoy. ARRRRRRRRRRgh. But figuring out how the Gradient editing dialog works made me happy.

The SF poster was based on some of the insects we caught in the field - the "space bug" in the lower right corner and the "weird spider" (referred to as that for lack of a better name =PPPP ). More on their stories later. The images were drawn in pencil in the field and inked later, scanned, coloured with Paint Shop Pro and added to a watercolour background (I'm gradually overcoming my fear of working with colour) and lettering to look like an old corny movie poster.

With some digging and an email to a Polish entomologist I got the space bug identified as Aspidimorpha bilobata (transparent shell becomes opaque post-mortem because of tissue fluids drying up); and Laura found a picture of a similar spider which was in the genus Gasteracantha (with what I know of Latin, I think it's something like "spiky belly"?).

These creatures are so unimaginably fantastic to the urbanite, in that we'd never conceived of their actual existence, so that we labeled them in terms of science-fictional figments. This is what I wrote in an essay that Jodi was going to send to Haribon:

For an urbanite, a trek into the jungle is like an astronaut’s journey to the far side of the moon – so close, yet one never sees it. Too often we act as if our cities are spaceships, closed off from external change. It was staggering to realize that all the cities I had lived in (in Malaysia) once were very much like the forest around us: dense with life, growing, eating and being eaten, nothing inorganic but the rocks.