The result is the re-establishment of a breeding population of Chequered skippers in Rockingham forest, Nottinghamshire.  And, as a part of the publicity surrounding this conservation success story, Back from the Brink (Roots of Rockinghan) asked me to run an online illustrations workshop, painting this iconic butterfly.

This blog explains the steps involved in illustrating a Chequered skipper butterfly Carterocephalus palaemon. Be aware that sticking to all these steps will take a long time.  If you want a swifter result, you could go through to step 7, and then just add darker areas of colour without using the tiny brush strokes technique.

This approach is how I illustrate all the butterflies I get asked to draw.  To see more examples of my butterflies, take a look at my butterfly galleries.  There are also some step by step guides to illustrating other species of butterfly in amongst my blogs.

Here are the resources which were provided to people attending the online workshop (back in 2020).  Feel free to download and use them free of charge, but consider donating to help Butterfly Conservation if you’re able to do so.

Butterfly illustration workshop Chequered skipper Equipment list 2020

Butterfly illustration workshop Chequered skipper 2020

Butterfly Workshop Reference Sheet the Chequered Skipper

Butterfly Workshop Templates Chequered skipper

Butterfly Workshop Step by Step Visual guide Chequered Skipper

Gathering reference

Get your reference together.  A real specimen is always great, but be aware dead and pinned specimens hold their wings differently to living butterflies.  In this case, Butterfly Conservation provided me with a photo.  If you use photos you find online, do contact the photographer and ask for permission to use their images.

Photo from Butterfly conservation, with lower image showing the wings with typical Hesperiidae venation overlaid

It’s advisable to have several photos to refer to, in order to avoid perpetuating mistakes that may occur in one photo, and to give a better “feel” to what the norm for the species is like.

It’s also important to know where the veins are as these help to guide you around your drawing, and add biological accuracy.

Draw up the Butterfly

You can do this two different ways.  First, draw the butterfly by hand, drawing straight to page.  Check your measurements, and that your drawing has the correct proportions.  Do this by checking various measurements against your reference.  I draw with a mechanical Pentel P205 pencil, o.5 H or HB lead.

Second approach is simply to trace the photo and transfer the tracing to hotpress watercolour paper.  You only need to draw or trace one half of a butterfly as they are symmetrical.  Flip the tracing paper to get the other half.  Again, you need the photographer’s permission if you want to use this approach.

If you’re drawing freehand, a good way to draw a perfectly straight line (which you’ll need for antennae and veins) is simply to look at where the line is going, rather than at the tip of your pencil.  This comes in handy when you’re using a paintbrush later on.

Add the markings

If you’ve been sure to include the venation in your drawing, this isn’t too hard, just plot in the blotches of colour, using the veins as a map.  If you’re doing a tracing, you’ll already have this information on your traced drawing.

To avoid confusion, you can use a very light pencil to write the letter “Y” on the yellow spots.

Pencil tracings of the Chequered skipper without markings (top) and with markings (bottom)

Transfer the drawing to Hotpress watercolour paper

Again, there are various ways of doing this.  One is by using “tracedown” or “push-through paper” which has graphite on one side.  Insert this under your tracing and the watercolour paper, then redraw your tracing.

A second way is to draw over the back of your tracing with soft graphite, then re-draw the tracing.

The third and easiest is to make sure your drawn lines are on the side of the sheet touching the watercolour paper (you’ll need to redraw your tracing on the other side of the sheet to achieve this).  Then find a hard, blunt object, stick your tracing down with masking tape, and rub (not too hard).  The graphite will transfer onto the watercolour paper.

Check your drawing with the reference

Does it look symmetrical?  Are the wings lined up correctly?  Is the body the right width?  Fix errors now, you won’t be able to make changes once you begin painting.

Mix up your colours for a colour map / first layer of colour: Browns

The brown of the Chequered skipper is a warm, purplish colour.  Mix Vandyke brown, Cobalt blue, and purple (or similar colours) to achieve this.  Add clean water to make the colour more dilute.

First layer of colours: Browns

I use Winsor and Newton watercolours, a series 7 sable brush (size 1), and paint onto Fluid 100 Hotpress paper (unstretched).

When you’re painting, always try to follow the direction of growth – in this case, echo the direction of wing veins, and growth of the fur on the body.  The harder you press the thicker the line.  Make sure you allow the tip of the brush to follow the brush stroke; don’t push in the opposite direction to the bristles unless you want a thick and uncontrolled line.

Consistency of paint is important.  For paler colours (made pale by diluting with water, not by adding chalky white watercolour paint) it’ll be quite watery.  For darker colours you’re looking for a mix with a consistency a little like single cream, or blood.

Plot in the areas of brown, making the colour more diluted (and thus paler) towards the edges of the wing, and darker (less dilute) at the edges of the veins.  Keep highlights and veins as white paper.  In watercolour, your white paper is your brightest area of colour, so don’t swallow it up.

Don’t forget to plot in the browns of the butterfly body too, adding texture by doing longer brush strokes to emulate the hairs.

Once bone dry, and being aware of the veins, you can now rub out pencil lines showing the markings before adding the yellow.  Rubbing out over the brown paint will not lift the pigment but will remove the pencil.

Mix up your colours for a colour map/ first layer of colour: Yellows

The yellow is a mix of Naples yellow, Gamboge hue, and Cadmium orange.  Any mix of Naples yellow plus a lemon-y yellow and a touch of orange should work fine.

Apply this semi-watery mix to the edges of the yellow spots, and the edges of the wing veins.  With a lightly paler (more dilute) yellow, fill in most of the spots, only leaving white paper for highlights.

Yellows added

Add the yellows to the area of the body that need it; a horseshoe shape at the top of the thorax, the head, tail, and the clubs on the antennae.

Add details and texture: Yellows

Starting with the yellow, add depth, colour, and detail to your illustration by building up lots of tiny brushstrokes.

Mix a slightly darker yellow than before – less dilute with a tiny bit more orange.

The more strokes you make, the darker and more saturated that area will be.  For the yellows, focus on making these marks on the edges of the veins, and on the edges of the yellow spots.

Building depth of colour and texture into the yellows

Add details and texture: Browns

Mix a slightly darker brown by making a less dilute mix, and tweaking the ratio of the purple, brown and blues.

Using tiny strokes, lay down depth and colour, and build tonality and vibrance into your painting.  Focus on the edges of the veins, the wide areas of solid brown, and where the wings attach to the body.

Working into the brown of the lower wings

In the Chequered skipper, all the wing veins are dark brown, so outline these.  Make the edges of them less stark by softening them with the occasional tiny brown spot along their length.

When you come to an area of yellow, use shorter choppy lines to transition between the colours.  Lots of tiny dots will also help, and look a little like butterfly scales.

Close up showing how tiny dots resemble scales and help the eye “transition” between the brown and yellow areas

Don’t forget to work into the butterfly body.  Look at your reference to try and understand the direction of growth of the hairs, and let this inform your brush strokes.

Adding detail: Antennae and eyes

For the antennae and eyes, you need a darker colour, closer to black.  Mix some of your Brown with indigo (or a greenish dark blue) and a touch of purple.  This makes a much prettier black than a pre-mixed colour.

With a steady hand and a light touch, outline the antennae.  Then fill in the black stipes.  Once completely dry, get a very dilute bit of Cobalt blue and carefully put a thin line of this on either side, on the antennae, to provide shadow.

For the eye, using the same mixed black, outline the edge of the eye.  Paint around the highlight, where the light reflects from the compound eye.  One dry, dilute your black to a very pale grey, and add a subtle concentric circle of this around the highlight of the eye.  If you mess up, don’t worry.  You can always pick out the white shine on the eye with a bit of permanent white gouache.

Tweak your Yellows

Towards the body, and on the outside edges of the Chequered skipper’s wings, the yellow is a bit more orange.

Mix up a slightly darker yellow (by adding more orange, or even a touch of your brown).

Working into the yellows

Using the same technique of tiny brush strokes, add this colour to the areas that need it, always referring to your reference.  Don’t forget the butterfly body – there’s plenty of yellow in that horseshoe shape around the top of the thorax, on the head, and on the fluffy “tail” or base of the abdomen.

Tweak your Browns

Mix up a darker and bluer brown, by altering the ratio of the blue/ brown/ purple mix.

Using brush strokes to copy the fur, paint in lots of hairs that cover the butterfly body, always following the direction of growth.  Top with a dilute and watery brown mix, and allow to dry.

Browns are dark, only needing a little more depth

Knock back the veins on the wings

Using a brown, simply paint over the wing veins (which up til now have remained white).

Pick out your darkest darks

Mix a nice dark brown/black with your brown, blue, indigo, and purple.  Using the paint quite thick, and with the same tiny brush strokes, pick out your darkest areas.  At the junction of body and wing, where the top wing slightly overlaps the lower wing, in the middle of the large areas of crown, on the body.

Add hairs to the thorax and abdomen

Mix some Permanent white gouache with your yellow and using very light strokes, add some hairs to the thorax edges.

Do the same, but with a little black in, to add texture to the abdomen.  Don’t overdo it.  Play around til it looks right.

Completed butterfly

And here’s the whole process condensed onto one sheet:

Finished!

Well done! Go and make yourself a well-earned up of tea.

Never feel disappointed with a painting you’ve done.  If it goes well, that’s lovely.  It if doesn’t, have a think about what you can learn from it.  Did you cover up all the whites of the page too fast?  Did you overwork it?  Do you need to practise to get your brush strokes finer?

Also, be aware, using this approach takes a long time.  It took me a good 10 hours to paint this Chequered skipper, and I’ve been doing it for years.  The more you paint, the more confident you’ll become, and the better you’ll get.

Final illustration – computer scan

Conclusion

I hope this blog has proved useful.  It goes without saying that this approach will work for every butterfly or moth you choose to illustrate.

Thanks for sticking with it.  It’s a long process, and anyone who claims painting is relaxing hasn’t been doing this sort of illustration! But the end product can be something to treasure, and a good reminder of the wonderful conservation story of the Chequered skipper.  For more on the conservation project, please check out the post from Back from the Brink

Here is the video that accompanied the online workshop on illustrating this butterfly.

Limited edition giclee A4 format size prints of the butterfly are available for sale at £40 each (including postage & packaging to UK – add an extra £10 to cover p&p for international addresses).  Butterfly Conservation will receive £10 per sale to help them fund future exciting conservation projects.  Please email me on: info@lizzieharper.co.uk if you’re interested.

The post Chequered Skipper Butterfly Illustration appeared first on Lizzie Harper.

Apologies for the grey background on some of the photos.  The final piece (at the end of a blog) shows a truer version of the colours.

Setting up

When you’re about to illustrate a subject that may take a while, like this Sycamore leaf (Acer pseudoplatanus), it’s important to make sure you have everything you need readily available.

Clear a (clean) space for yourself, if you’ve not got a dedicated table or studio.  Get a jar of fresh water.  Give your paint-box a cursory clean.  Have several specimens of the species you’re illustrating available.  Make sure all your equipment is right there; you don’t want to be having to go and find a tube of paint or a pencil in the middle of working, it could break your concentration.  Make a nice cup of tea.  Now you’re ready.

Equipment

I’m currently using Fluid 100 hotpress watercolour paper.  I draw with a mechanical pencil, a Pentel P205 0.5mm, direct onto the watercolour paper.  I like Winsor and Newton watercolours and use pans which I top up with paint from tubes. My trusty brush is always a Winsor and Newton series 7, number 1 size.

Leaf ready for paint

Decisions, decisions

Next, decide how you’ll tackle the subject.  This leaf is yellow with green and brown markings.  Should I paint each area of colour separately, or layer colours on top of one another?  Decide where your light source is (conventionally from the top left) and be sure you stick to this.  This is easy enough if you have a light and are painting from life!  Think about what colours you’ll be using to mix up the greens, yellows, and browns.  For this sketchbook study, I also need to decide how much of the leaf I’m planning on colouring.

I decide to lay down yellow first, then add top washes of greens and browns.  I’ll aim to colour approximately half of the leaf.

Base layer of Yellow

I mix a yellow that matches the yellows on the leaf.  This is Cadmium yellow light, plus a tiny bit of Yellow ochre, and a dab of Cadmium yellow dark.  I’m not brilliant and keeping track of which colour in my paint-box has which name, so apologies if this leads to confusion.

The consistency of the paint matters.  Too wet and there’s not enough colour, too dry and the paint doesn’t move right on the page.  Rather unpleasantly, I like to say aim for paint that’s similar to the thickness of blood.

Looking for darker areas, which mostly lie alongside the veins, plot in your darkest areas of yellow.  These can be hard to see and it’s worth extrapolating.  Use the areas of highest contrast on the leaf as a guide to where your shadows will lie.  If shadows fall below a vein and are darker to the left of a portion of leaf blade, then this may well be the pattern across that whole side of the leaf.

Paint in these areas across the leaf.  Be sure to concentrate the whole time and paint what you see rather than what you assume is there.

Softening the edges of the base layer

Once the yellow is dry, I dilute it into a lighter yellow with lots of clean water.  This makes the colour paler.  With watercolour, you always lighten colours by diluting them rather than muddying them by adding white.

Taking my brush I gently work around the edges of the yellow shapes.  This softens them.  It’s vital to leave plenty of white as the white of the page acts as your highlights.  Once you’ve covered an area of white paper with paint it’s impossible to lift that colour off, nor can you paint anything on top of it to get it good and white again.  Err on the side of caution, you can always make things darker at a later stage.

Adding a yellow background to the leaf

Once these layers are dry, we can add yellow to the surrounding spaces.  I speed up the drying process by using an electric fan heater, or a hair dryer.

A top layer of bright yellow is applied, over what I’ve just painted and most of the rest of the leaf.  This mix is not very watery, but not as thick as the initial yellow.  I apply it to the perimeters of the Sycamore leaf and the edges of the veins.  While it’s still wet I add water to the rest of the leaf and allow the yellow to bleed into these regions, albeit in a paler form.  Again, it’s vital to leave some areas of white and in fact ion this case it’s at this stage that I swallowed up too much of the white of the paper.

I also mix up a brown, Vandyke and Yellow ochre, and put some of this on the edges of the teeth of the leaf.  Again, I allow this to dry fully before going further.

Greens

This Sycamore leaf has big areas of green remaining, and I want to add these.  I repeat the steps I used to apply the yellow, looking all the time at my leaf to make certain I’m painting what I see rather than what I think might be there.  Adding areas of dark, and then softening them with a more dilute mix; I plot in the greens.  The paint mix in this case is Winsor and Newton Sap green, and yellow ochre, mixed with some Daniel Smith Spring green.  I always mix my greens, I’m yet to find a pre-mixed one which is close to the true colour of leaves.

Working into the Green areas

This leaf is proving a headache, and I hope that adding some darker areas to the green patches will help.  I mix a darker green, adding brown and a touch of purple to the mix.  Where the green touches the edges of the veins and the shadow is deepest, I pick out these darks.  It’s rather nerve-wracking as if you go too dark, the whole illustration is compromised.

Delineating the veins and leaf margins

To satisfy the eye, the edges of a leaf need to be crisp.  I use a yellowish brown for this, mixing Yellow ochre, Vandyke brown, and purple.  I pop the paint on the edges of the Sycamore leaf, then dilute it and pull a paler tint back into the leaf body.  This means there’s a gradation between the leaf and the edge, and it helps the illustration look more natural.

I also put some of this colour over the veins.  I am not delighted with the result, although I know I’m applying the right techniques.  Something extra that unifies the leaf is required.

A unifying Yellow top-wash

I go and have a cup of tea, and when I return I decide to whack a bright yellow wash over the whole thing.  It has to be said that this isn’t something I normally do, but I was feeling dissatisfied with the way the illustration was going.

I mix a medium consistency yellow colour, mostly Cadmium yellow.  Using quite a wet brush and working fast, I cover the entire leaf in this yellow.  Immediately it feels better, and is glowing a bit more.

I get a little carried away and mix up a tint of green and repeat the top wash.  It helps, but in doing this I lose more of those precious highlights.

Don’t overwork it!

I’ve reached a point where it’s ok.  If I go on adding layers over the entire leaf, then I’ll swallow up all my highlights and the entire illustration will become muddy and dull.

This is a tough decision, when to stop trying to redeem a painting.  If you get it wrong you end up with something you can’t fix.  Settling for something you know is decent is sometimes the best you can hope for.  I decide to wait for the paint to dry and to mix up browns for the leaf spots.

Leaf spots and detail

This is always the most fun, adding detail.  I mix up a dark brown, using lots of Cobalt blue and purple with a dark green and the Vandyke brown.  The paint is quite thick, and I make sure my brush has a sharp point as I’ll be picking out details.

Sycamore leaves often have these black spots, which are known as Tar Spots.  They don’t seem to do the tree any damage, and are a result of a parasitic fungal infection.  The pathogen is one Rhytisma acerinum

Illustrating these diseased areas requires the same level of concentration as painting the leaf itself.  They’re not the same colour throughout, and there are distinctive lines on some of the bark patches.  Not all the browned regions of the leaf are a result of Tar spot.  Some come from stress, and some are developing as autumn progresses.

I delineate the edges of the Tar spots with a sharp brush tip.  Once dry, I use a wet mix of a yellower brown, and allow the paint to dry and add its own edges to those I’ve illustrated.

With the tip of the brush I add the tiny speckles and spots that populate the leaf.

Final touches

I notice that there are tiny holes at the centre of some of these brown spots, and pick them out with Permanent White gouache.  This paint is also useful for covering up mistakes, and I use it quite thickly.

Finished!

The sketchbook illustration is done.  It’s not quite as good as I want it to be, but it’s serviceable

This leaf was illustrated as I painted it, on film, and I think that trying to paint and explain myself at the same time inevitably has some effect on my work.  However, as a sketchbook study of a Sycamore leaf on the turn, it’s good enough.  It’s one detail of a sheet of information on the Sycamore I’m completing for FOR Sweden, who have commissioned another batch of invasive species studies.  For more of my Sketchbook illustrations, check out my online gallery, or see which of the originals are available to buy.

If you’d like to see the film (be warned, it’s an hour long!) feel free to take a look:

There’s also an accompanying blog which discusses how I drew up the leaf  This too has a film of the process.

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