Marbled Orb Weaver in charcoal

And now for something completely different.

Well, a little different.

This illustration was for a spider display I created at work a few years ago. The original is in (cheap, pressed) charcoal, but the scan loses a bit of the texture.

The species drawings were supposed to be fairly basic, and the first few were... but as is often the case I got on a bit of a roll and the later spiders started looking a bit more realistic.

I like spiders for a lot of reasons (not the least of which is that they eat insects), and the reason I like them from a doodling point of view is that they are, at least in my eyes, functionally beautiful. Nothing is superfluous on your average spider; it's all there for a reason.

That's cool.