Lycaenops: Part Three

I think that if Oscar Wilde were to have a Lycaenops ornatus skeletal diagram on the wall of his study it would be this one. It's all about the mauve.

I did this all in Illustrator. I used the Live Trace feature to convert my pencils into vectors. I really like that function -- it keeps a lot of the initial juice from the pencils and gives you a nice clean editable vector image.

The last time I did this I couldn't figure out how to handle the color in Illustrator; this time I hit the books and found out how to do Live Paint. Worked like a dream; even with the studying it took me a lot less time to achieve the same results. I believe I'm falling in love with Illustrator all over again.

Irritatingly, when I went to double-check the name of the brute on Wikipedia, I found a high-definition photograph of the skeleton that was used as the basis for the diagram from which I worked. (I believe I will keep that awful sentence; perhaps I'll have it stuffed for my collection.) I'd started this project off with some googling for these kinds of images.

Damnit. Wish I'd had that at the start.

Now to whack the color out of the skeleton and print it up and start drawing over it... See you in a while.