Butterfly - step by step process pictures

Echoing rooms, empty of furniture, hung from floor to ceiling with large frames. Each frame neatly labeled and categorized with anywhere from a few to hundreds of butterflies and moths. Small, mottled brown and white ones that blend into bark nudging up to large, iridescent one from exotic places.

This room is easy to hurry through. The glimpse of the larger animals in the next room draws visitors on, making it a conscious decision to stop and examine the thousands of diverse specimen. A world of entomology in just two rooms. These specimen are like small jewels, glistening behind the glass of their frames.

In mid January I was struck by a fancy to create a series of illustrations based on some of the specimen in the collection of our local museum so I went through with my camera photographing with abandon. These photos are a part of my large reference photo library and where influential in the creation of my fossilized fish illustration done on papyrus.

Spent the last week working on this illustration on and off. I really like both line drawings and watercolour illustrations so I decided to simply do it half/half. The style reminds me of an illustration in one of my many biology text books back at university.

I started with a grid so as to keep everything symettrical on both sides.