Fire Spider by Meg Lyman
12×16″ gouache on Colourfix (relevant WIP)
$250 – e-mail or visit Etsy
In the long-ago days before they were sentient, Nephila females simply built webs and waited for males to come to them. They’d hold out for a good specimen and eat the rest. But as their brains grew, so did selection pressures. Impressively fuzzy joints, a big, sturdy web, and an intimidating abdomen were no longer guarantees of a mate. Competition escalated ridiculously over the millennia. Modern Nephila females have taken to night-time fire spinning to impress potential mates, and the competition has evolved into festive tournaments where betting is lively. And they still eat inferior males when they can get away with it.
Great story to go along with a great illustration.
Btw did you get a bit of this from a dream you might of had?
The reason why I thought this, is because I had a really neat dream of a similar nature. It was so neat, soon after I woke up, I sketched the image of the creatures in my sketch book and wrote a snippet of the story beside it for a later project. Btw it had nothing to do with spiders but with birds.
I would be terrified if spiders actually did something like that in real life. The final piece looks great tho, had no idea what it would look like from your How-to post.