The Painter Rodney Matthews Has Done A Lot Of Extremely Badass Bug Art Over His Career, But I Really

the painter Rodney Matthews has done a lot of extremely badass bug art over his career, but i really want to highlight these album covers he did as especially incredible depictions of little bug dudes rocking out

and in particular i'd really like to focus your attention of the greatest keyboardist of all time

Fernand Khnopff - Caress of the Sphinx (oil on canvas, 1896)

Sphinx but instead of asking people riddles, it just badly and awkwardly flirts with people instead

The Gabbling Wuggthea

My response to this week’s BestiaryPosting challenge from @maniculum (thanks again for posting these challenges!)

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

Thought process under the cut…

"Rabanus says of the Wuggthea: ‘The Wuggthea gets its name from its talkativeness; not, as some would have it, because Wuggtheas fly in groups; clearly, they are named for the cry they give. It is a most talkative species of bird and makes an irritating noise, and can signify either the empty prattle of philosophers or the harmful wordiness of heretics.’

More can be said of the nature of the Wuggthea. The Wuggthea lives in the woods and flies chattering from one tree to another, as a talkative man ceaselessly tells others about his neighbours, even the shameful things he knows about them. When the Wuggthea sees someone pass, it chatters, and if it finds anyone hiding from the world, it does the same, just as a talkative man slanders not only worldly men but also those hidden whom a religious house conceals. A Wuggthea, captured and finally secured, is shut away on its own to learn to speak words clearly. Sometimes it happens that a Wuggthea, held in confinement, escapes; then the bird, which was formerly talkative, makes even more noise after its escape."

I'll be honest, I like the sound of this bird (probably a lot more than the author, from the sounds of it!).

We don't get a lot of description of the appearance of this bird, but I imagine it would be fairly small (since it flocks together), and fairly plain (as a fan of birds, 'plain' is relative, but I imagine if there was much in the way of distinguishing features they would have been mentioned.

I knew I wanted to draw a flock of these birds, ideally being as loud and obnoxious as possible. Then I had the thought of them bothering a traveller (hence the excuse for some more medieval-style oak trees). Then I thought about Disney Princesses, and Sleeping Beauty (with her entirely not period-appropriate outfit - as an aside, I found a new interesting website to check out...), being surrounded not by demure and deferential chirping cardinals and bluejays, but by a flock of overly enthusiastic Wuggthea all eager to show off all the great sounds they've discovered (and you just know that if any of these birds did escape from captivity, they absolutely will have learned some swear words along the way... :p

Not deliberately trying to guess the identity of this bird, but I did take a lot of inpiration from one of my favourite common birds that loves to adopt weird and interesting sounds, from radios and birdcall to car alarms (spoiler warning for what I think it might be, but I may have also taken a little inspiration from this post... ;)

Reblogging as it looks like this entry was posted to late to be included in the roundup, and the fictional natural history in these entries is always interesting and well thought out. Also, the throat pouch/frigate bird influence is a really cool one (frigate birds are absolutely wild :)

The Wuggthea

I love making up weird birds for this game of bestiary telephone. (Design partially inspired by the very aptly-named Magnificent Frigatebird, which I only just found out about when looking for inspiration. Birds are already so weird.)

The Wuggthea

The Wuggthea, also called the Large-Throated Woodpecker or the Chatterbox Woodpecker, is a species of bird that migrates from eastern Europe in the summer to southern Asia and parts of Africa in the winter.

Female and male Wuggthea have vastly different appearances. Females are slightly smaller, and their feathers are a mottled pale grey across their entire bodies, and they have light grey beaks. Males, on the other hand, have solid grey or black feathers with white shoulders and underbelly. The undersides of their wings and tail are bright red, as is the tuft of feathers on the back of their head and a spot on their forehead, the tip of their black beak, and their featherless throat sac.

Wuggthea eat mainly invertebrates. Though they are often called woodpeckers, and do drill holes in trees, they are just as likely to search for their prey in the soil, or to seek out infested corpses and eat the insects that gather around them. Occasionally a Wuggthea will also eat small vertebrate animals, particularly frogs.

A Wuggthea is capable of making a wide variety of noises. Their most common vocalisations are "chattering" or "chuckling" sounds, which are used for communication. There is also a range of "shrieking" or "screaming" sounds, which are used as alarm calls, and a "cackling" noise which signals the discovery of a rotting log or corpse rich with invertebrates. Males can also use their throat pouches to amplify their "croaking" or "thumping" calls, which are used to vie for mates—those with more impressive calls and more prominent throat sacs are more likely to win partners.

Wuggthea can also make some imitations of sounds they hear, though they are not as clear as those of a raven or parrot. There were some attempts in the 12th century to domesticate Wuggthea, train them to mimic particular human speech sounds, and present them as exotic pets in parts of Europe where they were not native, but their capability for inflicting damage on wooden buildings and producing all manner of unappealing, loud noises when confined made these ventures short-lived.

The Maternal Ghraggal

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

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

Thought process under the cut…

"The Ghraggal is named for its swiftness [redacted]. It is a beast distinguished by its varied markings, its courage and its extraordinary speed. Hircania is their main home."

So, this is basically all the physical description we get about this creature. It's fast, so I figured I'd give it quite long limbs. We know it's a beast, but not a lot else. If in doubt, by default beast is something somewhat dog or wolf-like, so we have a vaguelly canine-looking creature with long legs and a variety of markings, ranging from almost like stripes on the legs, to finer spots on its underside and larger, more irregular shapes on its back and sides. Hopefully it all gels together as something coherent; I took a lot of influence from the patterns on girafffes, particularly the Rothschild's, Masai and Southern sub-species.

As an aside, Hyrcania seems to be part of modern day Turkmenistan and Iran, which doesn't actually help. However, Hyrcania roughly translates as 'wolf land', which would be a reall cool reason for me to lean 'slightly canine' except I found out about it after I'd done the drawing... ;)

"The female Ghraggal, when she finds her lair empty by the theft of a child, follows the tracks of the thief at once. When the thief sees that, even though he rides a swift horse, he is outrun by her speed, and that there is no means of escape at hand, he devises the following deception. When he sees the female Ghraggal drawing close, he throws down a glass sphere. The female Ghraggal is deceived by her own image in the glass and thinks it is her stolen child. She abandons the chase, eager to gather up her young. Delayed by the illusion, she tries once again with all her might to overtake the rider and, urged on by her anger, quickly threatens the fleeing man. Again he holds up her pursuit by throwing down a sphere. The memory of the trick does not banish the mother's devotion. She turns over the empty likeness and settles down as if she were about to suckle her child. And thus, trapped by the intensity of her sense of duty, she loses both her revenge and her child."

What. A. Jerk. Amirite?

Again, very fast creature, faster than a swift horse. Also, if we're being charitable, not the smartest creature either...

We also know that this is a creature that is valuable enough for someone to raise one from a baby, that hunters have developed increasingly expensive and elaborate methods to achieve this theft!

This did take me down a bit of a rabbit hole of 'crystal ball photography', which I tried to recreate as best possible. :)