5 Comments
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Korimako Song's avatar

I really like these B&W sketches. Are you using stippled paper to get that effect?

Melanie Newfield's avatar

Thanks. I'm glad you like them. I'm using a very smooth drawing paper, as I find it better when using very fine ink pens. All but the Canterbury knobbled weevil were drawn with a 0.1mm Indian ink pen. The Canterbury knobbled weevil used a combination of a brush pen and 0.1mm pen. The stippling is literally me placing every single dot.

Korimako Song's avatar

Wow! That’s impressive. I bet it’s meditative too.

Melanie Newfield's avatar

It is. Drawing every day has become a relaxation activity for me, something which gets me off my computer.

The AI Architect's avatar

Fantastic read and the illustrations are superb. That detail about the hunchbacked shelf wasp being host-specific is cruical context people miss when talking about biological control. I remember working on a project where we evaluated control agents, and the differece between specific parasitoids versus generalist predators was night and day in terms of ecosystem impact. The Picasso comparison made me laugh though, sometimes nature just does weird stuff and we try to make sense of it.