The Bugs collection starts with a book.
In 2017, Pavilion Books published Bugs - a children's illustrated reference book I wrote and illustrated in association with Buglife, the UK insect conservation charity. It features over 50 species, from the familiar to the genuinely strange. It was also published in France as Insectes by Casterman. HarperCollins, who later acquired Pavilion, still have it in print.
In 2017, Pavilion Books published Bugs - a children's illustrated reference book I wrote and illustrated in association with Buglife, the UK insect conservation charity. It features over 50 species, from the familiar to the genuinely strange. It was also published in France as Insectes by Casterman, and in Chinese by Foreign Languages Teaching and Research Press. HarperCollins, who later acquired Pavilion, still have the English edition in print.
Working on the illustrations reinforced all of that. Each one was built from research drawings and refined for print, with the aim of making the structure and detail of each insect as clear and striking as possible. The brief was a children's book. The approach was closer to scientific illustration.
The Axisophy Bugs collection takes those illustrations further. Each print goes back to the original artwork and reworks it for wall scale - refined composition, adjusted detail, proportions designed for larger formats. The result sits somewhere between natural history plate and graphic art. Scientifically grounded, but made to be looked at.
Insects have been subjects for natural history illustrators for centuries - from Maria Sibylla Merian in the seventeenth century to the great Victorian entomologists. There's a reason for that. Enlarge them, study them closely, and they become almost overwhelming in their detail. They remind you that the natural world is full of forms as sophisticated as anything produced by human design.
That's also why they work on a wall.
Bugs is still available from HarperCollins. The prints are here.
