Black carpenter ants may best be known for hollowing out wood and being a nuisance to homeowners everywhere, but did you know they also are pretty powerful swimmers? For this project, I wanted to highlight their advanced swimming techniques and useful anatomy that help them propel through water.

Finding the best way to present my findings required a good deal of thumbnailing different compositions.

In order to really understand and capture the specific swimming strokes of the ants, I used a little makeshift pond to observe some live ants swimming. Recording their strokes and replaying the videos in slow motion helped capture their different movements. I also made a (very rough) clay model to help find a good angle and composition.

These are my final transfer sketches, rendered in graphite and compiled in Photoshop

Then came rendering everything in Photoshop. Most of my time was spent playing with the water menisci and adjusting how to best depict the leg movements in the schematic below the hero image.

Here is the final rendering: