Sketch of the Week: Post-Apocalyptic Centipede Silo Takeover

Today's sketch was drawn when I was in a somewhat dystopian state of mind:

This is a study for a copper drypoint I had been thinking about doing a few months ago. You may recognize the silo from several other sketches I've done since I've moved here. It's a striking piece of vernacular architecture in town, and between the graffiti and the rust stains, it's definitely got stories to tell. It's also appeared in the work of more than a few artists around here, from Jerry West to Peter Hurd.

I was imaging a post-human world when I drew this, one where there is sufficient oxygen in the atmosphere for insects to grow frighteningly large again, as they had in the Mesozoic era. Anyone who's ever spent time in the Southwest will know about the large centipedes that live here; the bigger ones can be the size of a hot dog. Anyway, when it comes to creatures that aren't like us anatomically, centipedes are among the first to come to my mind, so they seemed to perfect representative for the post-human Roswellian landscape. 

I was apparently pretty serious about this sketch at one point because I actually traced the outline of the copper plate so that I could work to scale, but I never did anything with the imagine beyond this.

But who knows, I just might go back to it.