Luna Moth

Ren is a grad student who studies moths, and they were very clear that they did not want a cute moth. They wanted Actias luna with the wing venation actually correct: the right number of cells, eyespots in the right spot, tails the right proportion of the body length. They sent me three reference plates and a photo of a specimen drawer. This is genuinely my favourite kind of message to get.

Sternum is the hardest placement I take, for two reasons that make each other worse. First, symmetry. Your ribcage isn't symmetrical, almost nobody's is, so a stencil that's perfectly mirrored will look visibly crooked on a real body. You have to break the symmetry very slightly to make it read as symmetrical. Second, the surface moves. Skin over the sternum shifts several millimetres between an inhale and an exhale, it's thin, and there's bone right underneath, so it's genuinely one of the more painful spots, which means the client is moving too. Very fine wing lines that need to stay parallel are being drawn on a target that changes shape every four seconds.

I built the wings as one flat drawing, then split the stencil down the centre line and applied each half separately with Ren sitting upright and breathing normally rather than lying flat. That let me nudge the right wing about 2mm lower so it sits with their ribcage instead of fighting it. We marked the centre against the sternal notch rather than the collarbones. For the linework I stopped and reset constantly, never more than four or five seconds of contact, always on the exhale, working outward so I was never crossing a wet line. The venation is a 3RL and the wing wash is a 7-mag, whip shaded in three light passes with heavy dilution rather than one heavy pass, because grey wash over bone is exactly where blowouts like to happen. Two sessions, three weeks apart.