butterfly

This butterfly was an attempt to create a realistic illustration. This illustration is a vector illustration. For a wire frame view roll your mouse over the image.

inspiration

Butterflies are very beautiful creatures and remind me of how beautiful the world can be. Living in a city it is easy to lose sight of nature and it's many miracles. In my opinion butterflies are very eye-catching, a quality of which I wanted my illustration to possess.

process

There are so many possibilities when using Adobe Illustrator. For this particular illustration I used many of illustrators built in effects. I used the pen tool to draw all of the shapes in the illustration. Once I drew all of the shapes I then worked on changing the fill color. For the butterfly's wings and the flowers I used the gradient tool, the wings are simply a linear gradient and the flowers are a radial gradient. For the antennas of the butterfly I used the gradient mesh tool. For the leaves in the background I used a fade effect on the edges and a blur on the whole leaf. For the lines in the leaves I used the blend tool and lowered theopacity.

challenges

If you look at the wire frame view of this illustration (rollover image), you will see that many lines were used to create this illustration. This illustration was very time consuming which can sometimes be discouraging. Another challenge was the background. I wanted the illustration to have depth and therefore faded out the leaves, which was tricky.