Arachnids of Arizona - my second photo collage poster

This poster was more challenging than the beetle poster because I know much less about spiders than about beetles. I also included other Arachnids because I wanted some variety of body shapes and positions.

The other very time consuming problem was that I rarely photograph spiders on white back ground. Usually I leave then in their webs or running across the soil where I find them, I just crouch close and shoot my macro photos.  So I had to clean away the back ground, using the antiquated Microsoft Digital Image Standard 2006 Editor. I have photoshop elements. I found it more cumbersome for this task.

Spiders do not only have 30 percent more legs than beetles, those legs are also sporting lots of hairs and bristles that cannot be neglected. But I learned to carefully and tightly cut around those gawky appendages because there was no way to reach a pleasing arrangement without overlapping them in many places.

 I am glad that I tackled this challenge. Over the last 10 years, I had accumulated, and with the help of the experts identified, hundreds of  photographs of AZ spiders.  Now I could finally make some use of those photos besides just accumulating them in my Flickr Arachnid folder.  In the process of designing the poster I learned a lot about the diversity of our spiders, the multitude of different families, characters that identify them and some typical behaviors.

Now, a not even a couple of weeks after the poster was first shown on Facebook, the first order from the poster printer has arrived and is sold out, shipped all over the US. Thank you to everybody who ordered one!  Of course it came again with template and list.

At the last minute I decided to change the title of the poster, It is now called Arachnids of Arizona to better match Beetles of Arizona.