Finalist Award at TERAVARNA:
14th Animal

Finalist Award · 14th Animal · TERAVARNA, 2026 International Juried Art Competition

The blue on a Rosalia alpina is not a colour you can lay down. Look closely and it stops being blue at all: the wing cases carry a dense pile of fine pale hairs, and the black markings are velvet rather than gloss. Most beetles want a hard highlight somewhere. This one absorbs light instead of throwing it back, so every instinct trained on a stag beetle has to be put down before the first mark. Working out how to draw a shell with no shine on it was the technical problem behind this plate. In August 2026 it received a Finalist Award in TERAVARNA’s 14th Animal international juried art competition.

In August 2026, Fiurdelin’s hand-drawn Rosalia alpina illustration received a Finalist Award in the 14th Animal International Juried Art Competition, run by the TERAVARNA gallery in Los Angeles. The competition drew entries from artists worldwide across every visual medium, and bars AI-generated work at every stage of the process.

TERAVARNA
An Open Call with One Hard Rule

TERAVARNA is an art gallery based in the Fine Arts Building on West 7th Street in Los Angeles. It runs a rolling programme of themed international juried competitions, and Animal is one of its longest-running strands, now in its fourteenth edition. The brief is deliberately wide. Any animal qualifies, from an insect to a whale, real or mythological, in painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, fibre, mixed media, or digital work. Awards run down a ladder from First Prize through Runner-Up, Merit and Talent to Honorable Mention and Finalist, with winning work carried into press releases, social features and a curated online exhibition.

One clause in the entry conditions matters more than the prize structure. TERAVARNA prohibits AI tools and AI-generated content at every stage of the creative process, naming elements, compositions, textures and upscaling specifically, and disqualifies any work found to involve them. Competitions that state this plainly are still uncommon. For a studio whose entire argument rests on a human hand and a real specimen, that clause is most of the reason to enter at all.

The competition also routes five per cent of its entry fees to NGOs working on habitat and endangered-species protection. Entering a protected European beetle into an animal competition that funds habitat work has a certain tidiness to it, though the jury was judging the drawing, not the argument.

Rosalia alpina
A Beetle That Refuses a Highlight

The alpine longhorn beetle lives in old beech forest, in the sunlit clearings where dead and dying timber is left standing. Females lay into cracks in the bark. The larvae then spend two to three years boring through the wood before the adult emerges for a few weeks of summer. That dependence on standing deadwood is exactly what modern forestry removes, which is why the species is listed as a priority species under Annex II of the EU Habitats Directive and appears on the IUCN Red List. It is protected by law across much of its range, Italy included. The studio’s note on botanical art and conservation sets out why drawing declining species is worth the hours.

Fine-art print →

Alpine longhorn beetle, Rosalia alpina · Fiurdelin

Three things made this a slow drawing. The colour is the first, and it is not a shell colour at all: the pale blue-grey comes from hair, packed dense across the elytra, so it has to be built the way a moth’s wing is built rather than the way a carapace is. The black markings are the second problem, because they vary between individuals. There is no species diagram to fall back on, only the specimen in front of you. The antennae are the third. In males they run longer than the body, banded in alternating grey and black, with dark tufts on the segments, and they never sit symmetrically. Choosing where to put them is a compositional decision made before any rendering starts.

“A beetle whose colour is made of hair rather than shell has to be drawn like a moth’s wing, and nothing in the usual entomological toolkit prepares you for that.”

There is one more detail that never reaches the page. Handled, the beetle squeaks, rasping its hind legs against the wing cases. Sound is the one thing an illustration cannot carry, and knowing it is there changes how you draw the join between leg and body.

The Award
A Third Placing in 2026

Chanterelle →English Oak →Rosalia →

Chanterelle, English Oak and the Rosalia plate, framed · Fiurdelin

Fiurdelin is a botanical illustration studio on Lake Como, Italy. The catalogue holds 53 published plates. The TERAVARNA Finalist Award is the ninth international juried selection of 2026 and the third to carry a placing, after a Finalist at Ten Moir Gallery for Bombus terrestris and an Honorable Mention at LightSpaceTime for Papilio machaon.

This is also the third time Rosalia alpina has been selected this year. It was shown at Centro Culturale di Milano in the YICCA 2026 exhibition in early summer, then chosen by Gallerium for EXTINCTION: Save the Planet 2026. Three juries in three countries, working to three different briefs, have now picked the same beetle. The plate sits in the Alpine Forager collection alongside the porcini, the fly agaric and the Apollo butterfly.

The Rosalia alpina illustration is available as a fine-art print, or as a digital download on Etsy for printing at home.
Browse the collection →

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