Time for my third blog post, hooray for consistency! I wanted to share with you all a couple of photos I took, and then a digital painting that was inspired by them. High resolution photographs can be found on my Flickr.

This first picture is a gorgeous monarch butterfly that was fluttering from flower to flower drinking nectar. I was really struck by its coloration, I never noticed that their bodies were polka-dotted. The other strange thing about it was how fluffy it looks. Its whole body is covered in this black with white spotted fuzz.

The second picture is another butterfly I found in the lot next to my house, I haven't been able to identify it yet though. The undersides of its wings have three distinct eye-spots on them. When I got close it closed its wings to display them at me, probably as a warning. I tried to keep a respectful distance and managed to get a really great photo. The detail in its wings was spectacular, they almost have a kind of beaded look to them. It was super cool to see.

So after viewing these two awesome insects I came up with this concept that I sketched out on my iPad, then exported to Photoshop, here's the result!

She ended up coming out pretty nifty looking I think. Her "cloak" was very much inspired by the wings of the second butterfly with the coloration of the Monarch. Note the little eye-spots on the front. I wanted her to have a bit of a mysterious sort of expression and I think that shows through. This one didn't take too much time to complete, I was working with some pretty inspiring material after all.

As you may have noticed at the start of this post I provided a link to my Flickr account. I'll be updating that with any high resolution versions of the photos I post on here, and maybe some ones that will be exclusive to that account as well, so check it frequently for new stuff! Thanks for reading, I'll be posting again soon.