Vanishing V (Smith's Blue Butterfly)

Holly Downing

This hand-colored mezzotint is from a series of prints Holly Downing has been doing featuring vanishing species, in this case, invertebrates. Each impression is printed in black and then hand-colored by the artist. There may be slight variations between impressions.

According to Downing, the Smith’s Blue is a tiny, bright blue butterfly with a wingspan of less than one inch. It spends its whole life within a few hundred yards of two native plants, seacliff buckwheat and coast buckwheat, along an 80-mile stretch of coastal sand dunes in Monterey, San Mateo, and San Cruz counties in California. Smith’s Blue was placed on the endangered special list in 1976 when its native habitat started to disappear due to development and invasive non-native plants like ice plant.

Holly Downing notes on her website: "Mezzotint is a form of engraving, whose subtle qualities are achieved with tone rather than line. The artist spends many hours “rocking” a copper plate until the plate has thousands of tiny holes, each with a bit of raised burr that hold a tremendous amount of ink. A fully rocked plate prints a lush, velvety black, unparalleled in any other medium. To obtain an image, the artist scrapes the surface of the plate, variously lowering the levels of the burrs so they will hold less ink and thereby yield gradations of dark and light. Gradually an image emerges out of the darkness. The plate is inked by hand and printed on an etching press."