Passing Monarch

Having painted the background a while before Christmas, I was keen to start this one of a lilac-breasted roller.

When in Botswana, I tried hard to get some half decent reference shots of this species. I saw rollers often during my month long stay, mostly sat atop a small tree or bush alongside the track. But whenever we approached, yup... you guessed it... it would fly away before I could focus my camera on it. I had many shots of empty space or if I did get it in time, they would be out of focus, blurred by movement or tantalising captures of ends of tail feathers.

My best ref came on the very last day as we waited for the planes to come in to the small airstrip. But it was against the light. On another day we saw a roller that was hunting and I managed to get just a couple of shots (out of focus) as it chased an insect through the air.

This gave me two ideas for roller paintings and they could sit together, telling a story. This piece is the first... where the roller sees an insect fly by. And the second piece will be it chasing that insect.

Enlarging my original ref photo's on the computer to get a closer look at the insect being chased, showed me that it could well have been a dragonfly, or at least that's what I originally thought. So I trawled through my own photo's of dragonflies from the trip to find something I could use. It became obvious that the shapes were wrong... so my perhaps it was a grasshopper? Also the more I thought about it the more I wondered... would dragonflies be part of their diet. Dragonflies are strong fast flyers... would a lilac-breasted hunt them? 

So I did some internet search and found several sites that listed prey items seen to have been taken by this species. Dragonflies were not on the lists, but grasshoppers were. So.. that was looking more likely. But a grasshopper wasn't 'doing it for me' as my secondary subject for my painting. How about another of the prey species listed...Butterfly? I liked that idea.. I had quite a number of butterfly photo's... but which one? 

I had a think.. I wanted a plain blue sky as the backdrop...and suddenly I knew what it should be. An African monarch butterfly. The orangey colour of this species would sit beautifully on the blue sky colour (complimentary colours) and with the blues of the bird. I had several photo's of this species from my trip and luckily a few out of focus flight ones that I could use to get the wing angle and several of ones sitting to get the colours and patterns.

When I painted the blue sky, I used three tones and softly blended them to create darker tones to sit at the bottom and right of the composition with the lightest colour top left.. where the butterfly will be. So that will be a subtle 'eye puller' to the butterfly.

I had photo ref of the bird sat in many positions on branches and in varying light conditions but not in the position I wanted - having the bird's head to be turned and looking up to the corner with the butterfly. So again I turned to the internet to find photos of this species with their heads turned so I could see the angles of beak and plumage colouration. Having found a few I could work from, I drew the bird up on tracing paper ready to transfer to the board of blue.   

Finally I got to start on the painting of the subjects this week. I was working on the vegetation today and hope to finish it tomorrow.