Additional Notes

— About my art —

In the picture to the left, top row: The first half-butterfly draft image, and the first full-butterfly test image. There were earlier, work-in-progress, images, but those seem to have been lost. I cannot find the earlier steps in the process, for this butterfly, anywhere in my old art backup archives.

Well, at least I still have these two pre-final version templates.

Middle row: This is the finished template for the original Red Butterfly. Notice the changes, as I fine-tuned the wings. The first full-butterfly test showed that I did not have the wing shaped right yet. And further research, showed that I needed to do other modifications as well. Then I added in the white spots along the wing outer edges.

I wish that I had been able to find a few more pictures of butterflies to study, way back when, and more information about Monarch and Viceroy butterflies too. A little more information, and a few more pictures to study, and I could have done a better job of illustrating the wings and the butterfly body, and I would have made this into a full Viceroy butterfly, as I had intended, even though I did not know that it was a Viceroy that I wanted to paint. After seeing a picture of a Viceroy butterfly, that I thought was a Monarch butterfly, I knew that was the butterfly I wanted to digitally draw and paint.

Bottom row in picture above: The first finished version of the Red Butterfly, that I mistakenly called a Monarch Butterfly.

The picture to the right is of a lightly revised version of the original Red Butterfly. Here, I am mostly just adjusting the colors to display better on modern screens.

There is a version, or two, of this butterfly that came after this, but I think this first version was better. Making digital art is a continues learning process. I do get better with time, but I also take wrong turns every now and then, and it can take a long while before I realize my mistakes, or figure out a better way of making my art. Thus, now that my skills in making digital art have improved, all these years later, I cannot stand to look at that second version of the Red Butterfly, so I will not post a copy of it here.

I should also add that screen technology has changed quite a bit over time, and that has, in some cases, had a negative impact of some of my older digital art. Since the times when I created my first butterflies, we have all, or most all of us have, switched from CRT (cathode Ray Tube) monitors, to modern screens that are much brighter (although old CRT screens displayed colors that were much more vivid than many modern screens display colors), and this makes a lot of my early digital art look a bit washed out. The hue, saturation, and luminosity levels have been shifted, by these brighter screens, from the values I had intended them to have.

The butterfly to the left is an early version of the 2015 revised Red Butterfly. This one is a bit more orange than red though, so it is not a finished version, just another step along the way. If I wanted to make this version into a finished version, I would want to do more polish work on the inner areas of the wings.

Additional information about this version of the Red Butterfly, it is actually a colorized and retouched Blue Butterfly (which was made from the same template that I used to make the Red Butterfly).

The Red Butterfly to the right, like the A version of the Red Butterfly at the top of this page, has wing colors from the original Red Butterfly that have been merged with the wing colors of the Orange Butterfly (the butterfly just above). This is the B version of the 2015 Red Butterfly. It is a mix of the new, and the old.

This is a button-ized A-version of the 2015 revised the Red Butterfly.

This butterfly button came about because I was getting boarded with the tedious nature of refining several nearly identical butterfly art pieces. I needed to play around a bit to break the monotony of it all. Thus, I ended up with two new Red Butterfly buttons (and two Blue Butterfly buttons too).

And finally, this is the button-ized B-version of the 2015 revised Red Butterfly.

I call this the B-version because I finished the new antennas on the A-version of the updated Red Butterfly first. Then I can back and made these antennas, that look more like the original Red Butterfly’s antennas, but updated to look more like real Monarch butterfly antennas (never mind that the new butterfly versions still have Viceroy-like wings). ;)

One last note, I created the first version of the Red Butterfly for Jennie. I called her Angel, and after seeing a picture of her, I thought, surely it must be true. Unfortunately, our time as friends has long since passed, but I still have fond memories of an angel who came to me one night and shared some time online with me.

Michael A. Crane, Jr.
Artist/Webmaster/Writer