This is me and my pet butterfly

"Anise Swallowtail Butterfly"

Linocut with watercolor

I usually seek out the subjects of my drawings and prints, but this one found me. A couple of months ago, I was visiting Alcatraz Island with my daughter and her fiancé. It's my favorite tourist-y thing to do in San Francisco: Along with a tour that, after all these years, I still find fascinating, you get a great ferry ride out, gorgeous plants and birds, and perfect views of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge from the middle of the Bay.

While we were waiting for a return ferry (you can stay out there as long as you like until the last ferry) a group of kids behind us started getting all excited and were trying to get my attention: "There's a butterfly on your shoulder! It's right on your shoulder!" Sure enough, there was—a beautiful swallowtail. One of the kids could hardly take a breath: "Take a picture! Take a picture! And post it on social media and say, 'This is me and my pet butterfly!'" This one's for you, precocious kid behind me in line.

I couldn't let that beautiful image go, so I decided to do a linocut. But I didn't plan very well, and learned some lessons. I should've (and still could, I guess) printed the body color under it first. With these b/w prints, I can hand-color with colored pencil or, if I use non-waterbased ink, I can add water color (see above). I've tried both, sampling my new jar of black Akua soy-based ink, and some new Japanese paper. I also should have done this on un-mounted linoleum, so I could've cut away all if the blank area around the butterfly. I had to make a mask, or frisket, to keep those areas from showing traces on the print.

It's such a beautiful creature, colored or not!

Ten-Lined June Beetle

Prismacolor colored pencils on Canson Mi-Teintes pastel paper

Some husbands bring their wives flowers, mine knows I'd rather have a cool-looking beetle. He found this little beauty in our pool last week, and knew that I would want it.

I decided to draw it on this paper, because the color and texture of the paper looked exactly like its shell. It's drawn at about 4x actual size, which is about an inch long.

It's been a while since I've drawn insects (see my last one here); I wish I had more specimens available—they're so fascinating to examine under a magnifying glass!

Illustration Friday: Midsummer Night

When I think of "midsummer night", I may have fleeting thoughts of Shakespeare, magic and fairies, but they are quickly replaced by the image of the "night lights" we used to keep beside our beds on those warm summer evenings. Midsummer meant staying up late to catch our jarful of lightning bugs (we Hoosiers never called them fireflies), and making our mother promise she'd set them free to fly home after we were asleep.

There was always a book or two on the nightstand with them; it was likely to have been Charlotte's Web, which  holds its own against Shakepeare just fine, in my mind. Keep your fairies and magical forests—I'll take lightning bugs and the Zuckerman barnyard any old midsummer's day.

Note: Obviously, this isn't my usual detailed drawing, and it's less than three inches in size. It started as a little thumbnail sketch for a bigger piece, but I kind of got attached to it. Somehow, a tiny, quiet drawing seemed to best capture the image in my memory.


For more about fireflies, or "lightning bugs", visit this site.

Illustration Friday: Swarm

When I saw this week's Illustration Friday topic, swarm, I figured that this was a wonderful opportunity to try and draw one of my favorite things...bees!  I love bees as a design motif and own lots of things with bees and/or beehives on them.  But since I've never tried to draw any insects, I decided to email a beekeeper that lives not far from me, to see if he could provide me with some bee "models".  What a treat it was for my husband and me to meet Steve Demkowski of Willow Glen Honey.  Besides being a very nice man, he's an amazing wealth of information, and clearly loves what he does, producing local honey, and teaching beekeeping in our community.  Thanks, Steve!

I brought home some wonderful specimens (recently deceased) of female honeybees (the males don't appear until springtime, I learned) and it was fascinating to examine them under a magnifying glass.  I tried to draw the "pose" that is similar to one that might typically be used in a scientific illustration, and I ended up combining the parts of several bees to get the ideal one.  (And yes, I know that one bee isn't exactly a swarm.)  A bee expert can probably find many inaccuracies, but it was really, really fun to draw.  With their beautiful symmetrical forms, insects feed right into my obsession with patterns and arrangements in nature.

Did you know that honeybees visit approximately 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey?  Check out the Willow Glen Honey website for more interesting facts about bees!