Another spread study of Louise's adventures! Here she is parasailing across the world. I wanted both a spider's-eye-view and a broader view as well, so on the left is a close-up forest scene and on the right a view of what sure looks like some Haussmannian Paris buildings. Details below.
The original is ink and pencil on watercolor paper and is 30"x11". I want a white space for the text as shown below, but so I added the gray to make that clearer before the color is added.
Some spiders really do parasail around! Not with such literal parasails, obviously. But it's really cool. Here is a vivid excerpt from Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles:
At 15,000 they [scientists], "probably the highest elevation at which any specimen has ever been taken above the surface of the earth," they trapped a ballooning spider, a feat that reminded Glick of spiders thought to have circumnavigated the globe on the trade winds and led him to write that "the young of most spiders are more or less addicted to this mode of transportation," an image of excited little animals packing their luggage that opened a small rupture in the consensus around the passivity of all this airborne movement and led to Glick's subsequent observation that ballooning spiders not only climb up to an exposed site (a twig or a flower, for instance), stand on tiptoe, raise their abdomen, test the atmosphere, throw out silk filaments, and launch themselves into the blue, all free legs spread-eagled, but that they also use their bodies and their silk to control their descent and the location of their landing.
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