Metamorphosis development

The main idea that I wanted to take forward from my original metamorphosis ideas was the idea of working with metamorphosis in nature and biology. I want to show the process of biological metamorphosis, for example a butterfly coming out of a cocoon.
Although this is kind of an obvious choice of direction, I had some ideas about integrating an illustrative style quite early on, so I will work with this idea for now.

To start with, I found a video on youtube with a fairly static camera shot which shows a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.



The first step in the idea is to draw out each stage of the process by hand. I used a fineliner in simple black on white to capture the shadows and detail in the illustration but not make it too busy or complicated a drawing. It is a bit like a stencil cut.

Next I have cut up the image into the individual steps of metamorphosis and got rid of any unecessary marks that might show up when the images are placed into Illustrator for finishing. 

Here I have created a basic grid for the layout of the 27 images (3 x 7) and then placed the images and edited them into vectors.

After this, I rearranged some of the images so that it is the starting point (the chrysalis) which stays lined up the entire way down the page of illustrations, not the butterfly itself. 

Below shows a possibility of a gradient in print, which I want to explore with screen printing. The natural hand-generated print process will relate to the natural subject matter more than digital print and will probably go down better at the book fair.