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buglady.bsky.social
BugLady 🎨🌿🦋
@buglady.bsky.social
1.8K followers 1.3K following 3K posts
Illustrator/painter who loves bugs, bones, and cool rocks. Anti-fascist, anti-racist, and pro-human rights. I block crypto/AI/NFT grifters who follow me. She/her. Support my art: https://linktr.ee/christinehutson
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buglady.bsky.social
A movie that takes place where you're from:
Poster for the movie, Six Ways to Sunday. It depicts 4 characters played by Isaac Hayes, Debbie Harry, Adrien Brody, and Norman Reedus.
November 23, 2025 at 11:22 PM
buglady.bsky.social
Art vs artist...
A small color illustration of a xenomorph egg (dark green), a facehugger (pinkish tan), and an adult xenomorph (gray and gray-blue), all depicted standing in profile against a gray, rocky, mountainous landscape. This is a very stylized, Renaissance-style natural history painting in watercolor, in the manner of Joris Hoefnagel (16th century artist). The illustration is inside of an oval-shaped area on a white, rectangular piece of paper, sitting on a drafting table. A woman with graying blonde hair and glasses is hugging a small baby goat to her face, hiding the lower part of her face. The woman has silver rings on her hand, and a tattoo of a mayfly on her forearm. The little goat has perky ears, is brown and white, with spots of brown on the white areas, and is looking off to the side in contemplation of....lunch, maybe? There are green trees behind her and a barn in the distant background. Don't worry about the goat kid, she will grow up to be a pet, not a dinner! Though I am definitely sniffing that baby goat, because they smell sweet, like fresh grass and milk.
November 12, 2025 at 7:03 PM
buglady.bsky.social
Land snail, unidentified species from western Pennsylvania, U.S.A. This is watercolor on goat parchment.
My detailed watercolor illustration of a land snail, painted on cream-colored goatskin parchment (the pores/follicles of the parchment are visible, which is typical of goat skin). The snail has a pink-gray body, and is out of its shell with all antennae extended, just going along from left to right on the page. The shell is a flattened spiral, golden brown with dark brown banding. The shell is not smooth and shiny, but rather has a corrugated texture, but very fine. There are pale yellowish veins visible through the translucent shell, which were identified by a malacologist (that is, not me) as being the kidneys of the snail. There is a soft gray shadow depicted under the snail, to suggest that it is moving across the page realistically. Signed by Christine Hutson, 2009.
November 9, 2025 at 1:30 PM
buglady.bsky.social
Well, today I tried stargazey pie. I really liked it (note: I did NOT eat a zombie mackerel head though). Anyway, a friend of mine made it, and it was delicious!
A stargazey pie! This is a pastry pie shell filled with a thick fish stew (or similar), and four actual mackerel heads are posed poking up out of the top crust of the pie. They have blank, empty, staring eyes. One of them appears to have glowing eyes. These fish have seen things.
November 3, 2025 at 12:51 AM
buglady.bsky.social
I really can't recommend this book strongly enough. It's about abolition. Abolition of slavery, prison abolition, all of it. I guess I'd say it's a fable, or a parable. It's deeply sad and it's beautiful and it's hopeful.
The cover of the book "The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain", a book by Sofia Samatar. The cover shows five shining, round blue rings interlinked together, glowing on a black background of space and stars.
November 2, 2025 at 10:20 PM
buglady.bsky.social
Yesterday was comics day. Great stuff! I especially like the last story in the Predator comic, the last in the series of four.

#Predator #Yautja #Hellboy #scifi #comics
Two comic books on a desk. One is a Darkhorse title, "Captain Henry and the Graveyard of Time", which is Hellboy-adjacent. And the other is "Predator: Black, White & Blood" #4, which is an anthology series of short stories. The second bookd has a cover all in black, white and red, and the cover of the Darkhorse comic has a very steampunk themed cover depicting clocks, a polar bear, a broken and desolate landscape, a man's face, and in the center is a man in a bulky diving suit with a glass helmet, connected to an umbilical cable, floating in the air. The art is by Mike Mignola, with his signature style. The predator cover shows a predator (youtja) drawn in gray and white, crouching on a large, gray, moss-draped tree branch, with his hands dripping in red blood and his helm spattered in red. The background/sky color is red, darker at the top of the page and fading to a lighter tint toward the bottom.
November 2, 2025 at 1:35 PM
buglady.bsky.social
I'm at a Goth-themed night market in Pittsburgh. They do this twice a year and it's always a great time. Waiting to eat Tansylvania chimney cakes...
Flier for a Goth night market in the Allentown neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA. Entertainment, food, and vendor venues are listed on the vintage-style flier, including a drag show, some DJ's, and other live music.
October 11, 2025 at 10:42 PM
buglady.bsky.social
Just a spicy little gal who clearly has plans. (Yes, we are boycotting Disney and its subsidiaries, but I have seen what I have seen, and darn it, I intend to have fun with these creatures on my own).
A watercolor painting on light gray paper, lying on a drafting table next to paintbrushes and cakes of watercolor paint. The illustration is of the extraterrestrial "eye midge" from Alien:Earth. This creature is a slightly oval eyeball, but with several irises and pupils ringed around the "equator" the eye. Extended from the bottom of the eye are seven pink tendrils with black tips, and one tendril in the center of the mass. There is some light smoky gray smudged here and there around the tendrils (mostly because I made a mistake with gray paint, and smudged it on my art, and I hid it by placing more gray all around. It looks nicer this way!).
September 19, 2025 at 11:10 AM
buglady.bsky.social
But also:
Colorful medieval illustration of a part-cat, part-snail. Gray cat is coming out of its patterned orange snail shell.
September 15, 2025 at 11:48 PM
buglady.bsky.social
Oh yes, I intend to save some to have made into jewelry, this is gorgeous stuff! There is almost zero calcite in this, it's the purest I have ever seen. He bought it to make into artists' pigment, but I could not bear to powder all of it up. No way.
Six large, irregular pieces of very dark blue stone sit on a countertop. This is gem-quality lapis lazuli, which has been dipped in water to show its intense color. Nearby is a tin full of more blue rocks.
September 1, 2025 at 10:15 PM
buglady.bsky.social
I received some books and art by @dragonsofwales.bsky.social for my birthday! Lovely, lovely work. And so many tyrannosauruses! I do love the fluffy ones.
Three small books of art by Andy Frazer, the covers featuring very detailed color illustrations of large dinosaurs or reptiles (heads only). And there is one color art print in the background featuring a feathered dinosaur (head and neck only), with a bare red head, much like a vulture, and long, soft, grey feathers right behind its head, with amber eyes. The animals on the book covers feature a Megalosaurus bucklandii painted in earth colors, a charcoal grey Thalassodromeus sethi (a pterosaur), and a colorful Tyrannosaurus rex. The covers read: Ex Terra (1, 2, and 3,).
August 17, 2025 at 11:23 AM
buglady.bsky.social
Well this sucks. I have ordered a replacement pair from Zenni, but until then I am stuck with an ugly spare pair that I had from Target Optical. I can see, I am just goofy-looking until I get the new ones (or maybe I am always goofy-looking?). Damn it.
A pair of stainless steel rimless eyeglasses are sitting on a wooden desk. The plastic left lens is utterly shattered (I stepped on them).
July 3, 2025 at 6:42 PM
buglady.bsky.social
I am soooooo old..... My uncle took me to see this *in the theater* when it came out in the U.S.! Back then it was entitled "Godzilla vs the Smog Monster". I loved it so much, I loved Godzilla, and I still do.
Godzilla is on the left, in profile, fighting Hedorah (AKA, the "Smog Monster"), which is essentially a person in a rubber suit that looks like a pile of pollution and trash dredged out of the sea, with giant, glowing red eyes. The creature was meant to call attention to environmental pollution in Japan as well as other places in the world. Godzilla has ALWAYS been political.
June 30, 2025 at 1:11 PM
buglady.bsky.social
I'm Chris, and I do nature/botanical illustration, but I do paint monsters and creatures too. I am also a calligrapher/illuminator, so here is a little monster popping out of a letter!
Wow, this one is tough. This is a Large letter P, painted in gold watercolor in medieval style ("Lombardic" style). The gold P is set with tiny little jewels on its surface, they're very 3D and look like they're sitting on the gold. The stones are multi colored (red, pale blue, etc.) and a couple are square. The hollow loop of the P is filled by a little monster, which is crawling or flying out of it. It is a grey-blue and pink cluster of smooth tentacles with an eye in the center, the eye is rimmed in pink flesh, with a red iris (but it's not an angry eye, it is a calm, curious eye, looking to the left, where it is going out of the letter). The creature has one tentacle wrapped around the upright part of the P, and some tentacles are in front of the letter, some of them are still behind it, as it comes out of the center opening in the letter. It has two pinkish wings, one wing is already out of the letter P, and the other is still behind part of the letter (does this make sense?). The wings are also fleshy, with little tags and tentacles of skin hanging off, but in a smooth, soft way. The creature is all pastel colors, with a soft expression.
June 19, 2025 at 10:53 AM
buglady.bsky.social
One could try this idea in any number of ways. I got the idea from an old Japanese sketch of a much simpler slug, and just made my own version with a detailed slug. The trail here is a pale gray ink, but I wonder what a pearly ink could do too (and would look more realistic!). My model:
Slug, Nagasawa Rosetsu, ink on paper, 18th century. On some cream colored paper, a simple black and gray ink painting of a slug going toward the upper left hand corner of the paper (with its antennae out), but leaving behind it a wandering trail of pale ink all over the page. The artist's signature is in Japanese calligraphy on the right side of the page, with a circular red seal on the left side of that.
June 13, 2025 at 10:30 AM
buglady.bsky.social
We watched Predator: Killer of Killers, and I've never before seen anything like a Predator comic come to life like that. It was amazing. And don't look away, you'll miss something for sure, it's all action. Highly recommended.
The face of a Youtja (Predator from the movies), lit red and looking at the viewer. He only has his right eye showing, the other is covered by a visor that also seems to wrap around his head like a band, and he has some sort of respirator or other device covering the interior of his mouth (the clawed outer mandibles are still free). His eye is glowing red, and he is wearing some textured body armor. Behind him is the interior of his ship, with blue lights on the dashboard/display visible. This is a still shot from the Hulu animated film "Predator: Killer or Killers".
June 12, 2025 at 2:41 PM
buglady.bsky.social
A watercolor illustration of a xenomorph egg, a facehugger, and an adult xenomorph standing on a barren piece of land with sharp mountains in the background. The egg is a pebbly dark green with a pink interior showing, and mucus strands sticking to it. Next to it is a facehugger painted in a pinkish-ocher color, and to the right of it is the adult alien posed in a profile view, crouching on its haunches. The alien is dark blueish-black with shiny highlights, and its tail sweeps alongside of its body with the stinger out in front of it. There are rounded pebbles in the ground, and sharp, wind-carved mountains in the background, painted in gray and with soft, misty areas implying fog. The sky is a very light, cloudy gray. Around this scene is a gold hairline in an oval shape. This is in the style of Joris Hoefnagel, a painter who lived in the late 16th century. He left four manuscripts (The Four Elements) of hand-painted natural history illustrations in this style, parts of which are housed in the U.S. National Gallery of Art library. This piece was inspired by those albums, which I have seen in person. The painting is on white paper (there is another version of this that I made on blue paper).
June 8, 2025 at 11:38 PM
buglady.bsky.social
Here's a monster!
A watercolor painting is on a desk, next to a sketch of the painting. The illustration depicts a fish-like entity floating among violet and dark gray clouds. It has a bifurcated fish tail, anal fins and pectoral fins like a fish, but everything else is...wrong. Where a fish's head should be there is just a large, sleepy-looking eye surrounded by a collar of fin-like projections, and crowned by a diadem of long-rayed fins at the top of the "head". There are twisting, ribbon-like strips of some material floating around its body. There is a bright, light area behind the creature, making it seem to be engulfed in a halo of light among storm clouds, rising into the air like an angel. The creature is a dark golden bronze color, with touches of dark gray-blue and violet on the fins. The twisting ribbons are the same gray as the surrounding clouds. An angel, or a demon? Nobody knows.
May 27, 2025 at 8:18 PM
buglady.bsky.social
I found a bee in my basement today! I rescued her and placed her on a dandelion, and she stuck her proboscis right out to drink. Not sure of species, but we do get mason bees trying to come inside sometimes. Pittsburgh, PA, U.S.A. #InvertFest
Photo of a small bee (possibly honeybee worker or mason bee? Not sure of species) is sitting on a dandelion flower and drinking nectar with proboscis out. The flower is surrounded by dandelion leaves and green grass, which is all damp after a light rain. The bee was recently rescued from a house basement, so there is some lint on her back from the cellar floor.
April 25, 2025 at 6:00 PM
buglady.bsky.social
Look who I found on my raspberry plant! Possibly Phymata fasciata (ambush bug). I put him right back. Sorry about my blurry phone photo though, I hate this phone for taking pictures. #InvertFest
A small true bug (some species of ambush bug, a predatory hemipteran), sits on the dull blade of a gardener's knife. This one was found on a raspberry plant, to which it was returned. The ambush bug is tan and brown with partly clear wings, with a bumpy body and legs that camouflage it among plant stems and leaves. This one was waiting in the center of a whorl of new leaves, and totally looked like part of the plant it was on. Pretty cute little guy! I love that these are keeping possible pests off of my raspberries!
April 25, 2025 at 2:23 PM
buglady.bsky.social
Working on some examples of acanthus leaves for my upcoming manuscript illumination class at the Phipps Conservatory this summer. My colors are pretty muted by comparison to the original MS. #medievalsky #medieval #manuscriptillumination
Photo showing a watercolor painting of two decorative acanthus leaves, copied from the Göttingen Model Book, which is a medieval (15th century) manuscript meant to teach illuminators how to decorate books. The ones I've painted are long leaves with "lobes" all along their length; each leaf twists and turns around a central staff or post. They are subtly shaded, with one color on one side of each leaf, and another contrasting color on the other side (which is visible as the leaf twists and turns over). The left side leaf is a soft gray-blue on one side, and a metallic gold underside. The right side leaf is a soft mauve-purple, with a bright green underside, but it's not finished quite yet. Down the center of each leaf is a central vein, marked out with a series of tiny white dots. And since the artwork is still on my desk, there is a paintbrush in the photo, and a little dish containing green paint. This style of decoration was used in the Gutenberg Bibles, some of the first printed books in Europe. Though the type on the bibles was printed, the margins were still decorated by hand with painted designs like this. So texts like the Göttingen Model Book were instrumental in spreading this particular style of illumination in Germany in the 15th century. I like to just use these leaves to practice my brush work. It's relaxing, with no goal in mind except working with the materials.
April 20, 2025 at 2:13 PM
buglady.bsky.social
I submitted a nice Lovecraft-inspired cephalopod creature. But these are the ones that I was talking about (one in full color, and one version in monochrome on blue paper). These are in Flemish 16th century style.
A watercolor illustration of a xenomorph egg, a facehugger, and an adult xenomorph standing on a barren piece of land with sharp mountains in the background. The egg is a pebbly dark green with a pink interior showing, and mucus strands sticking to it. Next to it is a facehugger painted in a pinkish-ocher color, and to the right of it is the adult alien posed in a profile view, crouching on its haunches. The alien is dark blueish-black with shiny highlights, and its tail sweeps alongside of its body with the stinger out in front of it. There are rounded pebbles in the ground, and sharp, wind-carved mountains in the background, painted in gray and with soft, misty areas implying fog. The sky is a very light, cloudy gray. Around this scene is a gold hairline in an oval shape. This is in the style of Joris Hoefnagel, a painter who lived in the late 16th century. He left four manuscripts (The Four Elements) of hand-painted natural history illustrations in this style, parts of which are housed in the U.S. National Gallery of Art library. This piece was inspired by those albums, which I have seen in person. The painting is on white paper (there is another version of this that I made on blue paper). Detail view of the egg and facehugger. A blue-gray monochrome watercolor illustration of a xenomorph egg, a facehugger, and an adult xenomorph standing on a barren piece of land with sharp mountains in the background. The egg is on the left, and has a pebbly texture with the interior showing, and mucus strands sticking to it. Next to it to the right is a facehugger in profile to show its legs and long tail, and to the right of it is the adult alien posed in a profile view, crouching on its haunches. The alien has its tail sweeping alongside of its body with the stinger out in front of it. There are rounded pebbles in the ground, and sharp, wind-carved mountains in the background, painted in gray and with soft, misty areas implying fog. The sky is a very light, cloudy gray. Around this scene is a gold hairline in an oval shape. This is in the style of Joris Hoefnagel, a painter who lived in the late 16th century. He left four manuscripts (The Four Elements) of hand-painted natural history illustrations in this style, parts of which are housed in the U.S. National Gallery of Art library. This piece was inspired by those albums, which I have seen in person. This piece is all gray and dark gray-blue and white on denim-blue paper, a type of paper which was popular in Hoefnagel's lifetime.
April 17, 2025 at 4:46 PM
buglady.bsky.social
I already had this guy blocked, from a block list...
The blocked profile page of J E Ferrand (from a block list entitled "A Very British Bigotry"). The guy is a transphobe, judging from his actual words.
April 17, 2025 at 9:18 AM
buglady.bsky.social
So we still have room in my Zoom class on pigments and paints! The class is only $25 USD, and is open to anyone anywhere in the world. This is one 2 1/2 hour lecture, no homework, no grades. #art #painting #illustration #pigments #watercolor 🐡 my.conservatory.org/8444
A photo of an array of materials used to make paint, including a bottle of gum Arabic, a jar of "green earth" pigment, a small ceramic dish full of cochineal insects used to make red dye, a dish of powdered pigment, and a palette knife resting on the dish. There is also a chunk of blue lapis stone, a tube of blue watercolor paint, a tube of pink cochineal watercolor paint (still in the box), a pan of green watercolor paint, and a paint-stick of orange watercolor.
March 28, 2025 at 3:22 PM
buglady.bsky.social
A dried oak leaf that I collected last fall. This is watercolor on a German printing paper called "Elephant Hide" (because it's a bit impervious to water, and you can wipe the paint off with a wet cloth). I love this paper for illustration. 🐡
Realistic watercolor painting of curled, dried autumn oak leaf. The leaf is maroon and an olive green, and the lobes of the leaf have thin, pointed tips. The leaf is painted on an ivory-colored, smooth paper with dark veins in, which mimics real calfskin vellum. The painting sits next to the actual leaf that is used as a model.
March 27, 2025 at 10:47 PM