American sculptor Mike Libby takes dried insects and mechanical/clockwork parts from old watches and timepieces, combines them and makes steampunk creations. The website, Insect Lab, features an interesting gallery of creations from all sorts of insects and arachnids.
Above is a scorpion. One can see how the designer used mechanical parts that roughly matched the contours of the arachnid, making a more cohesive shape rather than simply adding arbitrary details. Below is stag beetle. I think this looks really great, as stag beetles have a lot of presence to begin with.
I love that crazy green color! Mike Libby sells these creations for anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars. So, it’s pretty creative and worthwhile at the same time. Perhaps it gives you some ideas? I also like this concept because you could take a photo of an insect, and then use 3ds max or Maya to create CG parts and then composite an image like this yourself. It would be a great exercise in perspective and lighting, because you would have to orient, align, color and shade your objects so that they fit cohesively with the original image. In fact, before gathering further information, I thought these departed bugs were CG.
Speaking of CG bugage, the following scene from the film Jarhead contains CG scorpions fighting. I’m sure everyone who saw this thought it was real (it even fooled the director, he says so in the film’s DVD commentary) but it just goes to show what can be done:
Eric Chamberlain 