Art Spotlight - Butterfly [It's All About Me]

So I'm getting ready for a new airbrush project.  My brother is huge herpetology fan - more specifically, of the snake family.  So I'm doing a large airbrush portrait of this picture.  [WARNING!] If you're deathly afraid at even the sight of snakes...do NOT click on the link.  I will not be held responsible for  nightmares.

So I wanted to bring back an earlier airbrush portrait I did of a butterfly.  I don't remember where I got the reference photo, but it was pretty colorful and it inspired me.  I'm also a huge fan of macro-photography and so the focused foreground on a blurred background was an easy sell for me.

You can see the entire album here.

This one was a spur of the moment decision, so I printed off a thumbnail picture, pinned up a 19X21 piece of bristol paper, and rough traced the image.  Then I freehanded everything.  After I did this, I got my hands on Airbrushing Techniques: Step-by-Step, by Roland Kuck.  In it, Roland uses frisket paper to get clean lines.  This makes sense, but I think I was just anxious to dive into another airbrush portrait since doing Taco.  However, this next project is macro-photography, so I doubt I'll be using too much frisket.  I'm actually looking forward to more freehand.  I believe if I can maximize my freehand talent, I can get away without the need for time consuming frisket paper placement.

Color matching was done by eye.  This has become an interesting task.  I don't have 100's of colors, so I'm using transparent colors and then mixing what I need.  The nice thing about transparent colors and adding a drop or two of another shade is that you can build on those shades.  Opaque colors are going to be just that - one solid tone/shade.  Whereas transparents allow you to make tonal and shade changes - much like watercolor I imagine.  [I haven't braved watercolor yet].

Feel free to check out the album and leave a comment.

-Iwata airbrushes

-Createx colors