Patterned Entomology Images
Recently, I discovered this great resource page for students and teachers, Clipart, Etc. This page is full of royalty-free illustrations divided into themes. These have so many great uses. Give them a visit!
It’s summer! The insects are certainly out and about right now. For these guys, I started with pattered paper, which I cut down from the original 12×12 into 8.5×11 pages for use in the printer. My printer can’t handle even slightly heavy paper, so I had to make sure the weight was similar to normal printer paper. The best company I’ve found for that is Me & My Big Ideas. DCWV also has some pretty light weight papers in the numbered stacks available at Joann. I believe the current one is Stack 7.
I put several images on a page and printed them out. Then I cut the insects out. For some that requires extremely patient cutting. If your hand isn’t steady enough, get images without a lot of legs and antennae to cut out. Alternately, you could cut out a rectangle around the image, which would also be interesting.
As you can see in the image, some show the pattern really well, while some are only subtly patterned. The stick insect took on the correct color, but the pattern isn’t visible. Obviously, the more white area on your images, the more pattern you’ll get.
I now have several pages of patterned insects. I am going to use them for scrapbooking and cardmaking. They could also be used for collage or creating interesting framed art or whatever you might want to do with them.
I originally posted this on my mom’s new website, Brush Creek Farms. Check it out — there is a lot more to come.
