Anyone who grew up in the southern English countryside will be familiar with the Meadow Brown, a slightly scruffy brown scrap flapping its haphazard way between Hawthorne trees, dandelions, and nodding grass heads.

Anyone who lives on a Chinese university campus will be familiar with the small legion of workers generally employed to fix and maintain the aging facilities, and in summer to plant literately hundreds of peonies and chrysanthemums in from the the main buildings. Such is the perfusion of pollinating plants that substantial Common Bluebottle (an unfortunate name, as in England a bluebottle is a carrion fly) specimens flap between the crumpling concrete façades.

 

 

I’ve wanted to explore painting butterflies for some time (I’ve got a few classes saved on expressive butterfly painting) so I thought this class would be a good place to start observing realistic subjects before I tried a more expressive approach. I ran into a few challenges - it was difficult to get the orange luminescence I wanted on my meadow brown (I will experiment more with paint mixtures) and painting the wings of the Bluebottle was really difficult to do without creating a muddy finish (but not un-useful practice). In the end, I broke up some of my mistakes with a bit of wet-lifting technique, which I was actually happy with - the final result was a bit more textured than my original reference image, but I I wanted to capture an image perfectly, I would have bought a camera.

I showed these to my wife as soon as she got home - “Look,” I said, “There is me, the scruffy countryside butterfly and there's you, the elegant city specimen”. She looked at my proffered offering for a long moment before giving a languid nod of assent, the kind usually only given by dynastic monarchs and extremely pampered Siamese cats.

Higher praise could not be asked for.

I look forward to continuing my butterfly painting journey. I’ll return to this class as I continue to improve my skills, and I’ll continue to paint butterflies wherever I live.