A few days, I was enchanted by the edges of moth wings. I got as close as I could with my phone/camera and tried to zoom in. I wanted to enlarge the interesting patterns. I didn’t do much preparation aside from an attempt to draw the wing segments in as symmetric a manner as possible. This explains my need for T-square, straight edge and French curves. As for the colors, I just guessed and applied them as I saw fit.

Today’s watercolor experiment:

I took another crack at a moth watercolor. Here is my source material, the photo and the enlargement of the midsection:

Process:

I thought I would do more preparation in the painting department today, instead of the drawing/drafting arena.  I haven’t thought much about making test strips for the earth tones, but that is what I did.

From left to right are yellow ochre, quinacridone burnt orange, burnt umber, raw sienna, burnt sienna and quinacridone nickel.  Now I had a better idea of which earth tone matches the moth’s back.

As for my drawing, I took little care in the symmetry or even the anatomical accuracy. If someone built a moth from my picture, it probably wouldn’t live. I added extra segments and changed some proportions. (It reminds me of the pilot episode of the original Star Trek where the alien had never seen a human being before, so they put the horribly injured girl back together as best they could…  I have a few issues with that, but I’ll save that for another time.)

To summarize, my drawing was not anatomically correct.  But I had my earth tone test strip. I matched the colors pretty well.

Comment:

There is a discontinuity among the components of this study. I tried glazing the central gray area, but this didn’t seem to help.  I used pen and ink to draw in some of the details of the segmented areas. The interesting patterns were small and mainly white in tone. I would say that they would be better suited for portrayal by oil paints rather than watercolors.

Sometimes preparation doesn’t help.  Next time I think I’ll try a butterfly, if I can find one.