Yet another technique for creating the image at the beginning of each LARVALBUG BYTES issue is simply drawing one. "Rainy Day Caterpillar" was drawn with ink and colored with pencils. After scanning the image, I did a bit more shading and blurring of the colors, as well as cleaning up the image, using MS Photo Editor.
Hand drawn frames can be used for animations as well. Several quick sketches of a dehydrating slug were used for the central image in "Slug Melt." The outer images are clip-art animations, while the moving text is simply a <marquee> tag.
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One heading that I used had very unusual glassy, dark metallic looking letters. The pair of immature water striders in "Blue Glass Bugs" were created by taking bits of the letters and using them as the elements of the insects. Needless to say, they matched perfectly.
While elegant, detailed images are nice, it is always fun to get back to the rather crude animations that I draw using MS Paint. The theme of the issue on which I used "Scale Insect" was music, which gave me the idea for the animation. For those readers who do not play piano, the caterpillar is plunking out a C major scale, in what is known as classic scale rhythm. My apologies to Steinway for the use of their famous logo. I've been told that I should have added sound to this one, but I really don't like when the computer makes more than the usual warning noises at me.
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In keeping with the rather dark humor associated with Halloween, "Cockroach Trick-or-Treat" shows what would probably happen if someone were to open the door to an oversized insect. Yes, the idea was partly influenced by Kafka. The entire animation was drawn using MS Paint.
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Now that I know how to create and edit animations, I almost never use those found in clip-art sites in their original form. At the very least, I often have to optimize them for more efficient memory usage. In the case of "Worm Dive," there was little that needed to be done, but I wanted the symmetry of the added bird. The static stork is simply a reversed single frame from the animation.
 
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The technique of fade-out is very effective for rather "tame" animations, but it is difficult to keep the file size to a reasonable level. The letters on "Ghost Caterpillar" were created using MS Word's Word Art function, while the caterpillar itself was a clip-art graphic.
"Larval Lights" was very simple as far as the animation process, but the actual manipulation of the original clip-art image of the caterpillar was quite time-consuming. Each tiny light was added separately to the picture, but then the whole thing was just mirrored.
For "Moon Worms," I drew the moon in MS Paint, then added the little pop-up worms using a popular clip-art animation. Changing the delay on each frame can give an animation the feeling of more random change rather than the predictable evenly spaced delays often used.
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