Meet Esmeralda, an ant made from wenge (pronounced wheng-gay, a hardwood native to equatorial Africa), copper and black polycarbonate. The body is about 15cm long - 18cm including legs and antennae. The idea for the ant and both the spiders, Boris and Arthur, came from Adrian Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary "Children of Time" where spider evolution is fast-tracked and they become the dominant, highly intelligent species, frequently at war with the ants, also highly developed.
This was another lockdown project but it was shelved for a while as the wood was pretty hard to work and I got stuck on how to make the mandibles and the petiole (the section immediately after the abdomen). Come to think of it, the thorax was swine to carve too.
The eyes are made from cylinders cut from a sheet of 3.5mm black polycarbonate, rounded and polished. The mandibles are made from copper wire, the ends having been beaten flat and curved round.
The four parts of the body are joined with heavier duty copper wire and separated from each other with tiny o-rings. The wire is lightly crimped to increased the grip in the holes in the wood.
The legs increase in length from front to back in the ratio 13:14:15 with the longest being about 75% of the length of the ant. As with the spiders I've made, the limb joints are created by sawing halfway through the wire with a hacksaw and bending at this point. The feet are made by beating the ends of the copper on an anvil.
The copper is finished with liver of sulfur which oxidises the copper with a black to gunmetal blue patination. Interestingly, the natural colour of the copper shows though on the outside of these bends and mimics the pattern of the wenge.
August 2020