As one of my first projects in Illustrator during the spring semester of my second year, I was tasked with drawing an insect in Illustrator. I decided to draw a tarantula and though I had very little experience with Illustrator at the time, I wanted to push myself and make my tarantula look like it was alive. I tried to make the illustration as photo realistic as possible, but it took a lot of trial and error to get to my final product.

My first draft of this project included no hair, and was a mere black body with a few purple stripes on the legs. Though this looked like the outline of a tarantula, I knew that I needed to add  more effects in order to make this tarantula look like it was crawling across the screen. That is when I decided to add leg hair, which I made using the brush tool in Illustrator. I used the thinnest charcoal brush that was available, and I drew hair all around the outline of the tarantula in dark purple, light purple, and gray strokes. This was more like it! However, I still knew that there was much more work to be done if I wanted this tarantula to look realistic.

I took the fill away and decided I was going to add multiple gradients within the body to make the tarantula look more realistic, as opposed to it having a singular dark fill. However, I realized soon that the different gradients did not look cohesive and that I would need to find another way to fill the body. At this point, I also turned the purple stripes into gradients which looked better, but still I knew it was not how I wanted my final piece to look.

Finally, I decided to create 3 separate parts of the tarantula to finish my piece, the right legs, the left legs, and the body. Each part had its own gradient (the body having a radial gradient and the legs having different angled horizontal gradients) and I changed all of the purple gradient stripes to hair using the same technique I had done for the legs. It was also with this technique that I created the purple design in the center of the tarantula. The finishing touches were adding glow and blur to the legs, which made the drawing look more active and the legs more elongated, and a drop shadow to add a 3D effect. I then played with the layers to make it look like the tarantula was climbing over the words. Overall, this project took me hours and hours to complete but I am elated with the outcome. I pushed myself on this project and learned a lot of new skills while solidifying my existing knowledge. I could not be happier with the results!