Just testing out my pencils and paper, it was a good learning exp, plus Butterflies are not easy to draw! Damn mirror image XD Good to work with such a rich colour on paper again 🙂     So basically I wanted a somewhat simple butterfly that had some stunning colors. There are some very interesting ones out there but I chose this one for the vibrant blue, purple and orange. It creates a great contrast and will be perfect for testing out the blending of the color son the paper. The blue pansy butterfly is a very pretty one 🙂

    To do a mirror image on paper, well its really quite a pain. I started by sketching out one side then scribbling reference lines all over it to try and get the correct proportions and angles on both sides.

When I was happy with that I moved onto a new pencil line art fixing up the details of the pattern within the wings. I ended up doing just one side to get a feel for where the colors went and how the pattern should look. (you can see them in the gallery below) In the end it came out a bit different then the ref but I think I like it. Here was the complete butterfly line work that I came up with.

I was actually pretty happy with this piece, I got most of the shapes worked out. I continued to do a quick graphite version, as I needed to test out the paper with both colors and graphite. ( I have never used this type of paper before). Actually it was not quick, it was pretty time consuming, what a pain to color a mirrored image even with the line work lol. It went well but it was quite different then what I am used to. This paper holds the graphite very well and the blending doesn’t work the same for me. The entire process can be seen below if you are interested. the entire… project, took a few days to complete over a course of I maybe 2 or 3 weeks as I didn’t work on it everyday. more of an on and off project in between, that thing called life. enjoy 🙂 -Samantha Lim