Quick Sketch

This butterfly is a side character in the story I'm working on. It's funny, I can think and think about a character, but sometimes it's not until I draw them that I understand what they're really like. Maybe it's just the act of doodling- messing around and sketching different scenarios allows my mind to wander, and sometimes something just clicks. I read something interesting about Leonardo & his viewpoints on doodling recently... of course I couldn't find the book I read it in just now, but by googling "Leonardo da Vinci doodles" I tracked this down (from a website called Archimedes' Droodles):

When Leonardo da Vinci needed to get his creative juices flowing, he sat and stared at clouds or rocks... "If you look upon an old wall covered with dirt or the odd appearance of some streaked stones", he once wrote, "you may discover several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies...". Da Vinci heartily recommended this 'new method' of invention as a practical technique for "opening the mind and putting it upon the scent of new 

thoughts". The abstract, organic forms embedded in crumbling walls and hunks of stone, he believed, could be put to work as "terrestrial batteries for jump-starting the imagination

Inneresting, no?

Ok, and late add... After I posted this entry, I scanned a bunch of my first-draft sketches so I can put together a dummy. I'd like to really concentrate on composition & light in this book, so I did some photoshop mock-ups of lighting situations... Here's one. Like I said, I was getting kinda itchy 'cause I couldn't share what I was thinking for a while (like, physically couldn't share), so -- this is what I'm thinking!