A few days ago when I went to school to pick up Luci, the teacher told me that I had to take her to school the next day dressed up as an animal, I immediately thought of a crocodile, she also said that it could be something simple and suggested a butterfly. Once at home her mother, who liked the idea, told me to dress her up as a monarch butterfly, I for my part had already given in to the fact that it would be a butterfly, I refused to be a monarch and since I would be in charge of making the costume, I thought about what other species I could represent and I took the opportunity to make a nostalgic tour of the few books I still have on entomology, In the end I decided on the Papilio lorquinianus, the green swallowtail butterfly, a species that in my opinion is much more striking and less common than the well-known monarchs, as well as a discreet tribute to the French naturalist Pierre Joseph Michel Lorquin in honor of whom the species was named.
I set to work to draw the templates of what would be the wings.
To give depth to the wings, I decided to make them in four separate pieces that I would later assemble.
Once I had them in place, I prepared the thorax and abdomen, which would be the thorax and abdomen.
Then I started to make the sketch of what would be the cells of the wings. First I made the left pair of wings and then I used tracing paper to replicate the sketch on the right pair and in this way respect the bilateral symmetry of the same.
Then I proceeded to delimit the areas that should carry the black color.
Subsequently the white cells so that the tone of the cardboard does not opaque the colors that I was going to apply and then an aquamarine color to complete the base.
Once I had the base consolidated, I could work making the shading and the pertinent changes of tones, trying to replicate the characteristic Tornasol effect of these beings. In the middle of the process I decided to make a change to the lower pair of wings adding a phenotypic alteration of this species, although it is recessive and uncommon it is still beautiful, a reminder that nature even when wrong is magical.
The next day, a little tired from having slept so little, I was able to enjoy the spectacle of seeing luci fluttering down the street on her way to school.
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