How I Approach Drawing & Painting Complex Subjects
—Tools I Use to Make These Subjects Seem Less Daunting
Complex projects can often seem daunting—so when I'm illustrating a complex subject, like the Gila Monster I posted last year or the transparent chrysalis and Queen Butterfly I posted last week, I have a couple of tools I use that help make these subjects seem less daunting: lists and grids. Let’s look at lists first!
Little Lists of Little Steps
I start all my natural history illustrations outside, observing the subjects, making notes of colors, and taking reference photos. Sometimes I create a pencil sketch and add pen while on site; other times I may only make color notes and take a few reference photos.
In any case, once I’m back in my studio, if my art subject is complex I start out by writing a list of steps. I recently heard a quote to the effect of: if you’re facing what looks like an insurmountable mountain, think of it as 10 much smaller hills instead. That sounds like what I do! Here are my (literally) little (2”x3”!) lists of little steps for my chrysalis and Queen Butterfly art.
Breaking down the process into small steps definitely makes the art seem less intimidating! Also, many of the steps I listed only take a few minutes, so I can squeeze in a little art time even on really busy days by just doing one step!
Grids
Superimposing a grid on a subject is a time-honored method for artists to more easily see angles, scale and proportion. Albrecht Dürer was known for using a grid—and if it was good enough for Albrecht Dürer, it’s good enough for me! Ha!
Here’s my chrysalis and Queen Butterfly art showing the grids I drew in pencil for my initial sketch, plus the pen I added next.
To create these grids, I viewed my chrysalis and butterfly images in Photoshop and chose View > Show > Grid, then copied the grid pattern to my sketchbook.
My Next Steps
As you can clearly 😉 read on my lists of little steps, after I made a pencil sketch using the grid and added my pen, I completed the chrysalis art with the following steps. I:
used masking fluid to mask off the 3 “dots” at the bottom, spots on the wings, and the “swoop” area on the right;
painted the green leaf plus the dark orange and very dark gray butterfly wings;
painted gray over the entire chrysalis (including the butterfly); and
removed the masking fluid to leave the white spots white & then painted the 3 dots and swoop area yellow.
Moving over to the butterfly, I painted the green leaves and then used masking fluid to mask off every area of the butterfly that would not be orange. That made it super quick to paint the orange (which was a brighter orange than the butterfly wings in the chrysalis).
I removed the masking fluid and used a black waterproof marker to fill in the areas of the butterfly that are black—leaving the white of the paper for all the beautiful white spots on the butterfly. Finally, I painted the big arrow (blending the darker orange chrysalis color into the brighter orange butterfly color), added the text, and voila! What you see below is the final version on my Feb. 19-25 Perpetual Journal page that I posted last week.
Update on our Latest Queen Butterfly Chrysalis Friends
Chrysalis D (now known as “Dee”) eclosed on March 8 and Chrysalis E (now known as “Eclose”— ha ha—a little butterfly humor!) eclosed on March 11. Hooray! 🎉 Both butterflies seemed healthy, hung out (literally) on their milkweed host plants for a few hours before flying off, and are females, in case you’re wondering!
At this time 😊 we only have one Queen Butterfly chrysalis: Chrysalis F. The chrysalis is still green, meaning the butterfly-to-be inside is undergoing its magic transformation!
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Wonderful precision you employ! Amazing results. It speaks to me to pay more attention to winnowing a project to manageable parts of the whole. Thank you, for the close look at your art and story process.
Thanks for all the process info. Gives me some good ideas.