Arachnaphobes....look away now!!!

Hello folks, here is the first of my two promised step by step tutorials. This one focusses on the little spiders that I like to add to cards, canvasses, tags etc. They work perfectly for Halloween of course, but also anything featuring, or for, little boys, teens or grown men!
Here's a close up of three that I added to the canvas featuring my "Humbert & Spider Boy" stamped images. The one on the right looks like it has two little white eyes but it's just the camera flash reflection! You could add little eyes if you wished though with a touch of permanent white pen. You can see the whole canvas in one of my earlier posts back in February. So, to create these quick and easy critters you will need a fine black pen (I usually use a 0.1 Micron pen, but the fine end of a Marvy Le Plume would also work), black gems and whatever surface you are adding them to. I am just using white card here so that you can see things more clearly. Using the pen, draw a stuttery line coming down from where you want the spider to hang and stopping where you want him to actually be. Make sure that you don't draw a solid line as you are trying to get the effect of the fine spider silk, so the more hit and miss the better it will look. Next, draw four legs coming out from the line and to the left. Start them close together and try to make each of them go off in a slightly different direction to simulate those creepy spider legs! Repeat to the right of the line. Now stick a black gem to the bottom of the line so that it covers the inner ends of the legs. Tweezers can be very helpful for accurately placing the gems. Eh voila! A row of dimensional spiders created in just a few minutes! If you don't have any black gems you can use any others and just colour them with a black Promarker or alcohol ink. I prefer using the rounded gems but had run out and used faceted ones - but you can see that they look just fine. Remember that you can always add white dots for eyes if you want to go the extra mile on detail. Well, that's one step by step as promised at the weekend, so I will get on with the next one now. Hope you will find the spiders useful - they are great for adding that certain something extra to lots of projects. Let me know what you think and I'd love to see anything you make with them on!