Have you ever watched a butterfly, perhaps an orange and black Monarch, and wondered how such a beautiful yet delicate thing could fly thousands of miles? I leave a stand of milkweed in the clearing in front of my studio each year so I can study these amazing animals.

Milkweed is the favorite, and actually only, food of Monarch caterpillars, and so I watch the Monarchs come to the milkweed and lay their eggs. Here is a picture of the Monarch egg taken through a small magnifying glass. The eggs is about as big as a pinhead.

The eggs are laid singly and then hatch out into striped catepillars. This catepillar is only one day old and about 1/16 of an inch long.

After a week or two of munching on milkweed it looks like this.

Eventually, when the catepillar is fully grown, it will stop eating, crawl to a suitable location, like the eave of my house, and form a chrysallis.

Inside the chrysallis the catepillar undergoes the amazing transformation to a butterfly. As this happens the chrysallis turns dark, and finally the butterfly emerges as seen below.

The butterfly is not ready for flight yet, as it must dry its wings and pump blood through them, strenghtening them. I picked up this Monarch on a chilly evening, when it was a bit too cold for it to fly. I kept it safe overnight and when the morning came released it. It headed SW, the right direction for Mexico.

All these pictures were taken before I was offered the chance to illustrate Wings of Light. But like so much that I am curious about in nature, this information came in very handy when I began work on the book a couple of years later.

Wings of Light is about a similar migration, from Mexico to the Northeastern USA, except the butterfly in the book is a Cloudless Yellow Sulfur. I see these butterflies in my clearing as well, but not nearly as often as Monarchs. Cloudless Yellow Sulfurs are also very fussy about which plants they lay their eggs on. They prefer cassia, a plant which does not grow in my clearing. Here is an illustration of the yellow butterfly laying an egg on a cassia plant.

So a lot of what I learned from observing the Monarch, became the background I needed for creating illustrations. In some ways I am grateful that Steve Swinburne, the author, chose this butterfly. First of all there are a lot of books already published on the Monarch, and secondly, the yellow butterflies are a lot easier to draw than the monarchs with their complex black wing patterns.

One of the illustrations called for a scene in Central Park in New York City, in the rain. Since, at that time, my three grandchildren lived in NYC, I thought it would be fun to put them in the illustration. First I went to New York and took some photos of Central Park from one of the most scenic spots. The building in the center of the picture with the dark fancy roof is The Plaza Hotel, where the fictional Eloise lives.

Then I photographed my grandchildren posing, more or less, as if they were looking up at butterflies.

From that photo, and others, I did a sketch of the scene. Below is a detail from the sketch.

The whole sketch, called a dummy, is then traced onto watercolor paper and painted. In this way, if I mess up the painting, and that happens quite a lot, I don't have to draw the scene over again. I simply trace the dummy onto another piece of watercolor paper and paint it again.

From my reading I leared that butterfly wings are not ridgid like carboard, simply flapping up and down. The wings are flexible and their motion in flight is very complex and beautiful. I tried to incorporate some of that into my drawings.

Make a Model Butterfly

I also experimented with making a paper butterfly to use as a model. If you would like to make a paper model of your own click on the butterfly.