My mind went wandering again.
An as-of-yet-unnamed male insect character enlists the aid of an archaeologist to help him uncover secrets about his people's history. Not sure why yet, but I built Actra from the ground up, this shouldn't be too hard.
The archaeologist. "But Matt, insects don't lactate! Why does she have breasts?" Neither do chickens, but that didn't stop OWI. Plus, you instantly recognised that she was a female, right? Would you have if she were bare-chested?
Some cool physical details about these guys
-They have both an edoskeleton and exoskeleton, but the endoskeleton is much less defined than ours (we need ours for support, but they have the aid of the external armor). Some parts of them (like the face) is fleshy. This is how I gave them semi-humanoid facial features.
-The "milk" the females produce is really their own venom, beefed up with nutrients. Both genders are immune to the female's poison, so the infants are perfectly safe drinking it. Some of the more perverse or poor females will bottle and sell their milk, nutralizing it with cetain herbs and spices. Nutralized venom is considered an afrodesiac to many other species, and sells well at high prices.
-These insects have humanoid mouths, but their jaws are hinged and attached to their skull. They extend them to take bites out of food.
This is what I call the skeletal phase. I map out where I want everything to go, and work up.