#gonna have to figure out a tag for these bug anatomy posts if i keep getting asks about them

[bowelfly]

Hi there! Discovered your work today and I love it!!! You have such a lovely style. Do you have any advice for how you interpret the complicated insect anatomy into something manageable that still makes it distinguishable?

I've been trying to get into drawing insects but sometimes the leg joints specifically really have me scratching my head.

hey thanks a lot, i'm glad you like my bugs.

as far as drawing bugs goes, i do really think that having a grasp of insect anatomy and how everything fits together is really the best way to start figuring out how to simplify their designs in a satisfying way. unfortunately insect anatomy is so varied between and even within taxonomic orders and families that knowledge of how one group fits together doesn't necessarily always translate to others. i've found that when i have confusion over how things fit together with a particular beast, doing an image search for it's scientific name + "anatomy diagram" or something along those lines is often very helpful

after that i feel like it's just a case of the more you practice drawing them the more you can intuit which parts are more necessary to distinguish than others and which ones can be de-emphasized.

as far as the legs go specifically, keeping in mind that there's a million variations on this formula, this is sort of the generic plan:

note how the segments tend to slot into each other like little gimbal joints or something. and from the diagrams above you can see how the legs tend to be attached to the ventral side of the insect and then sort of splay out to the side.

again really can't emphasize how much variation there is on this schematic, with every segment liable to be massively expanded or contracted or disappeared altogether

i hope that was at least a little helpful? i'm hilariously sleep deprived right now so can't really put as much effort into answering this as i did with my little bug mouthparts tutorial from a while back