That was not the original name of this piece, but I think it’s much better!
The whole piece is an accident. The story is sort of funny.
For the occasional nerd interested in the how (they tend to lurk around here in impressive amounts), I scanned this little guy with a macro lens adjusting the FOV 3 times for each shot, that was horribly long, but the results were OK. Ish.
Before y’all call PETA on me - yeah, social media has been cruel to me sometimes - please know that it was not killed for the purpose of the shooting, blame the academic system forcing my friends to do that as part of their graduation. I’ve been recycling at best. Necro scanning at worst.
So I get this guy all photoscanned, not great around the legs and stuff, but body OK-ish. The poor little guy still has its needle in him.
I import him, process the whole thing like the early days free photogrammetry, get to the materials and the little guy literally lights up when I boost the saturation past 1, in unexpected places. He suddenly looks like a Star Wars ship, and its miserable needle now looks like a terrifying beacon! Coooooool!
I had mocked up some concrete flower pots earlier, in a slightly misguided “brutalist flower pots series” that has fortunately never the light of day, and used these as brutalist background structures.
A touch of my favorite murky green, some little lights in the background and here we are.
It just came to be. It wanted to be this. I have used many insects since them in other pieces, but not this one, he’s my one and only Blade Bugger.