The last illustration I did for the Boynton Poetry contest! This is for Hey Poetry Lovers in Friday Harbor by  Cadillac Joe Wright. Since it has Friday Harbor in the title, I looked up butterflies that would be there and found the Island Marble butterfly, Euchloe ausonides. Below you can see my math trying to get the butterfly size compared to the raspberry size right.

Here’s the pencils. Sketched in red, refined in graphite. I decided to do colored pencil on Duralar, so I didn’t even have to transfer the sketch, which is nice. Duralar is a polyester film that’s a mix between Mylar and Acetate, so it is transparent. I can just place it over the pencils and go.

The weird thing about Duralar is that either side can be the front when you are done, but you have to decide that beforehand. You can also draw on both sides for a complex result. For this one, I just did it straight—the side I was drawing on was the front. I didn’t use the back at all.

Because the Duralar is transparent, it ended up being hard to scan. I might grow a pair and do a back painting on these, but it is scary! That can mess up the piece. I guess I have a hi-res scan, so I can just do it and still have the digital version. You can only use, I think, guache. Acrylic paint will never dry. Or the opposite. Guache will never dry. Hence why I didn’t do it. Scanning with nothing behind left the whole piece too pale, so here I have scanned it with a yellow-orange sheet behind it. I used that color to fill in the whole background of the larger piece that the poem went on.

I did try another color background, but I just didn’t like it. All the nice soft edges got too hard. Making them soft like the scans would have take way too long for this particular freelance job. And I like the soft orange that it scanned with, and apparently so did the designer since he used it. 🙂