Butterflies

One of my previous jobs involved maintaining lab rooms for various university biology courses. One of the rooms had quite a lot of storage space, lots of drawers and cabinets filled with all kinds of preserved biological specimens for lab demonstrations. Not everything was actively used within the current curriculum, though, some things were just brought over from when the old labs were moved into the new building. And they just sat in the drawers.

One day I was cleaning up the lab and figuring out where best to store things, and I ran across a set of drawers I hadn't opened before. They were filled to the brim with black cardboard trays of preserved butterflies! Some had names. Some had dates. A lot had neither. The earliest dates were from the 1930s. They were so pretty! There was so much intricate detail up close that you just don't usually get to see in photos. Even being upwards of 80 years old at the time, they still looked really nice, but it was easy to see they had been handled a lot and a few had some deterioration issues. Seeing as there was no conceivable place to display so many in the lab or in the rest of the building, and they were destined to just sit in the drawers for some undetermined amount of time (and had lived there for a number of years already), I asked if I could borrow them. Feeling a need to extend the preservation of these lovely creatures, I felt compelled to see if I could mimic Nature with watercolor.

This was a great project in which to practice shadows. It certainly made a big difference to the finished outcome. My tiny paintbrush got a big workout, too, with so many intricate lines. At the time, I didn't think they made one small enough, so I ended up just making my own. I painted each butterfly on its own piece of watercolor paper, trying to be as accurate with colors and sizes as possible, and then arranged them within three different large frames. One of those I entered into an art competition and won a small prize, but it's been so long, I can't even remember the name of the gallery. Shame. I ended up scanning the butterflies individually a few years later and made cards or small cardstock prints with some that I thought would go well in a frame. On these I added the common and scientific names just to add more interest to the background.

I don't remember how many there were. On the order of 60 or 70 probably. Sadly, this is a project where I put all the scans of the finished pieces on a thumb drive and put it in a "safe place" and have since moved two times and can't presently locate the safe place as everything is still in storage. The framed pieces would be easier to access, but I have no real purpose in making new scans of them at this time. When I find the thumb drive I might explore options for some of the others since I don't want to sentence them to yet another metaphorical drawer, but I also am liking the blue x-ray style results of the inverse filter, so may explore options surrounding those instead!