Animation and Arachnids

I began my dive into the web by visiting Youtube, which is surprisingly more of a default for me than Facebook. There was a short animation by Felix Colgrave (specifically, “For Everyone to See”) in my recommended, and as a fan of his work, I decided to watch it. In the recommended videos was another animation by someone calling himself El-Cid. The content didn’t readily appeal to me, but I was certain I’d heard his name before, so I browsed his channel a bit. While I’d never seen any of his work before, it turned out, he was an associate of several Newgrounds animators I’d come to enjoy over the last couple of years, hence where I’d heard of him. With my mind on animation, I started thinking about a sketch I’d done recently where I couldn’t seem to get the coloration of the background quite right, so I googled cosmic backgrounds. I scrolled through the images for a while, but after it became abundantly clear I couldn’t imitate any of them just by having a visual reference, I searched how to make a cosmic background. The first site I visited only had tutorials on how to draw cartoon suns and moons — you know, the type with sunglasses and the sort — so I clicked out of there after a couple minutes. The next link was a blog by an artist who did daily sketches. He had an abundance of videos that were exactly what I was looking for, and I spent a bit of time clicking through those. When I was a bit lower in the list, the sidebar caught my eye with an article titled, “What Project Should I Work On?” As someone with a whole lot of creative projects in several different forms, I couldn’t help but pursue this question. Unfortunately, it was more unhelpful than I could have possibly imagined, as it boiled down to “I don’t know, just practice, I guess.” The sidebar did have a few new suggestions now, however, and the one I picked rather decisively was “sketch daily prompt: arachnid.” I have to say, I was much less disappointed with this one. Then I got to thinking about the relatively large spider I had encountered on my parents’ porch a few weeks ago, and I figured now was as good a time as any to identify it. I looked up Missouri spiders, and the result was a mixed bag. Slightly off topic, now I’m thinking about a bag of spiders, and I’m genuinely upset by this imagery. I eventually figured out that it was an orb weaver. Upon further research, I found that they are non-toxic and non-aggressive, so…I guess he’s chill. Then, with this subject in the search bar, the shopping tag caught my eye. And I had to wonder…what could possibly be under that listing? Surprisingly, it was actual spider webs. Less surprisingly, just photos and wet specimens, which I probably should have expected. Disinterested in pursuing that subject much further, I instead started looking into Missouri flora, then more specifically edible Missouri flora. And after skimming through an extensive pdf on both edible specimens and popular recipes for them, I concluded my blind journey through the internet.