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Remember last month's animation, "99 Bugs?" Yes, it is continuing. Now it is down to "98 Bugs." Boy, with so many bugs to go, all I have to do is come up with a new way for one to meet its demise each month and I've got a no-brainer subject for the next few decades! Just kidding. In fact, our current heat wave, as well as my lack of patience already has the little beasts dying off in groups instead of individually.
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Down to "88 bugs" now. The next issue was for Halloween, so it's time to call in the more creepy arthropods, especially spiders. Just one little larva gets it this time. I'm finding that inventing lyrics that rhyme is going to be the limiting factor on how long I can string out this idea.
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Surpise time! Although we started this time with "87 Bugs," I couldn't resist playing with the notion of how quickly insects can reproduce. Although this was created in November, here in Texas it is still warm and I find caterpillars all the time. In fact, I'd just been finding clusters of butterfly caterpillars that were hatching out very late in the season. Even if the cold holds off, the poor little beasts will have no leaves left to feed on soon, as even here we do have deciduous trees that go dormant for our short winter.
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Now that I've messed up the original song even more than at the start of this series, I decided to end it quickly. At this point there are so many that I can only call it "Lots of Bugs." Remember, they are just bugs, and not even real ones at that! No need to feel sorry for them. A quick wrap-up to these animations, in my mind, is a very nice Christmas present to our readers. Besides, I'm not one to leave dangling ends to stories. Of course, this idea will simply be replaced in the next issue with another that is equally inane.
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With the final demise of the 99 +/- larvae of bugs, I seem to have still been on a kick to draw lots of nondescript little vermin. This time it was the Valentine's issue and so the letters of the title and the dividers in the text all had little red hearts. Chigger season for us is right around the corner, so I drew some of the tiny beasts and the end result was "Chigger Heart." Nothing too intellectual here; this is mainly simply for the graphic effect. The whole animation was drawn in MS Paint. I always like when I can make the background transparent, but this often creates a larger file than if the background stays white. However, this time the transparent file size was slightly smaller!
Time to take a break from making animations. This next illustration was produced by doodling, albeit in PhotoShop. The original image was from a dingbat font and I just kept playing around with filters and such until it looked interesting enough to me (thank goodness for the undo button). The color was chosen to match the lettering of the title that month.
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Anyone who lives in the South and drives a car knows about love bugs. They are not a huge problem in our area because it is on the arid side, but near lakes or closer to the coast, these flies can be thick enough to plaster the front of an automobile with their connected bodies. It's as if they prefer to mate several feet above asphalt, especially that which is under heavy traffic. The animation this time was extremely simple, with only two frames. The insects were drawn with a pen and tablet device, the Wacom Bamboo.
Yet another very silly animation. It's just a play on words using mayflies and June bugs. I had actually created the pixellated insects some time ago and just reused them. The clouds and the sun were created in my favorite pre-set program for basic shapes: Serif DrawPlus. I don't use that program for anything else, but it is sure handy for making shapes that would take too long to draw by hand. This animation turned out to be lighter when not made transparent, so it needs a border on anything but a plain white background.
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With Memorial Day coming up, the military theme was a no-brainer. I started with army ants (which are real) and extrapolated. All frames were made using clipart and arranging the ants in various ways on them. Nothing very profound, but why start now?
The arrival of Independence Day always makes me want to include something on the theme of fireworks, explosions, patriotism, or all of the above. This time fireworks won out. The idea came easier than the implementation. Each different fireworks explosion is a separate graphic, with different timings to make sure they were never in synch for long. The fireflies are an animated background within the table. I probably should have made the fireworks transparent so there would not be a dark area around each one, but by the time I'd made all the different graphics, I didn't feel like spending the time on it. One of my criteria for these little spot illustrations is that they not take an inordinate amount of time to create.
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