Earning Your Wings: Butterfly Face Painting Master Class

1. Introduction: Hi, My name is Laura Pennock, and welcome to my studio was so excited to have you here today to talk about one of my very favorite things to paint, and that's butterflies. I have pain in more butterflies in my career is a face painter than anything else. It's the first thing kids think of when you let them choose whatever they want, and it is one of the most versatile designs that you will ever butterflies come in any color you want. They could be almost any shape you want. You can do tiny butterflies, your giant butterflies and everybody loves. One of the most special parts about painting butterflies is that they're a launching point to almost any other design that you want to dio. You can just do whatever you want to do, right in the center of the forehead, and then butterfly wings was like on all the sudden you have a Pegasus or you have a masquerade mask, and I'll show you examples of all of those through the class. But this design is really one that you want to have at your core, ready to go any time somebody asks for it. It's so magical to get to paint something you love so much or something. I love so much so often. But one of the problems is sometimes it gets kind of boring. Sometimes when we hear about are flies to go when you're in that folk. That is where this class could really help, because it will give you the tools to be able to reinvent yourself, to be able to try something new in order to keep your creativity alive. It needs to be fun for you. Your most beautiful paintings will be the paintings that you feel in your heart. My purpose in teaching this class is to be able to help both the beginner learn all there is to know about butterflies as well as help some of us that have been doing butterflies for quite a while. Take a setback and get a fresh look on this beautiful, beautiful organism that lives in our world. We'll go through five different decisions that you need to make, and I hope you understand what the different choices are. By mixing and matching different options at each decision level, we will come up with hundreds of different possibilities for these designs. Then I'll let you watch me as I demo two or three different butterflies that you might fall in love with and decide that they're ones you want to start paying at the end of the class , we're gonna have one very special video lesson where we're gonna look at other artists, work through their butterflies. We're gonna learn even more than you could. Just for me. One of the things that makes face being very unique is the movement that exists in our art . And those little butterflies we'll just fly out of your chair. 2. Butterflies and the Human Face: most artists when they go to paint a picture. This is their blank canvas. Us Arlen campuses. Right here we get a face. And so it's not quite so. Blake. So many artists spends hundreds and thousands of hours practicing with a human face, learning the planes of the face, learning the perspective, and has face painters. We have the most incredible leg up because if you look are starting, canvas already has the exact proportions of a beautiful face. It's it's there. It's already there. One of the reasons that a butterfly so beautiful is every lying on the butterfly comes into this very CenterPoint. It's the same way with a flower. You have the center point and everything goes around, and that just works really well for the human eye to be drawn to a single point. Even as you add any details to the butterfly wings, they all come to that very CenterPoint. When we look at putting it onto the face, the very most important focal point on the face is right there between the eyes, and that is the reason that a butterfly is such a splendid design. This is the perfect shape for a human face. Now if we were to do our flower on there, the center point, we trying to a circle and then we're trying to do all these pedals. Can you see that? Even though it has the same beauty in nature, it does not transfer. It's really lucky that a butterfly is something that we can just so quickly and easily use as one of the most amazing face paint designs. 3. Anatomy of a Butterfly: So let's look more about butterflies. What are they? It's really awesome that the symbol that they can have of beauty and of transformation, but let's learn a little bit more. Butterflies are a sub order of insect, and they have over 18,000 different species. So of course we have all the license that we need to paint as many different ones as we want, and that's awesome. But it's really good to understand what makes up every single butterfly, and those different parts are actually what make up every single bug, which, as much as we would like to pretend that ladybugs and butterflies are not insects when we actually look at them and where they fit in, they are insects. And so let's take a look at the anatomy and see what we can learn that can help us in our face painting. So we have the head and the thorax and the abdomen, and the wings connect at that thorax. So as a painting it on the face, we want to center that body right there on the bridge of the nose so that we have room for the head and the abdomen. So we have the top two wings are called the four wings and the pot, um, wings that we put under the eyes are called behind wings. The part closest to the inside is called the basal part of the wing. And then next comes the disco part than the post disco, and then the outer margin. And as you move out of the wing, often the designs get more complex and smaller, and then you'll have. The out outer edge of the wing is often a very dark color. The wings are made up of two membranes and those very skinny lines that we love painting on them. Those air, actually veins that carry nourishment to the wings when we're doing the antenna of a butterfly has more of a club shape at the end of the antenna, and the moth has that beautiful, whispery, feathery look. It's also useful to know this, because every once in a while you will get the cute little geeky kid, and you know what I'm talking about and they, you know, they're just trying to see how smart you are. And you can throw out some of these facts. You know, I know for me whenever I paint a tiger, there is that moment where it becomes a tiger on the kid, and it's it's amazing to see an animal there, and butterflies have all the same power. Getting a feel for what the rial creature looks like will bring a beauty and elegance to your work that you couldn't get from anywhere else. These butterflies are often in your local universities or at a zoo. They'll have a bulletin board that'll have 20 or 30 different species. We get right up against the glass and look at them. Take the chance to learn from the actual butterflies, and I guarantee your face painting will get better. 4. Five Choices Introduced: Every time we paint a butterfly, we have five choices to make. The first choice is the shape of the butterfly that we're going to use. The next choice is the base color. The third choice is the edge work. The fourth choice is the body of the butterfly or the centerpiece that we're going to use. And then the final choice are all the extras bleed in shadow How we're going to, you know, do the finishing touches on that butterfly. As we delve into each of these separate steps, you will see the amount of diverse options that you have in making that choice and by picking and choosing, along with a little fun activity that will do at the end, you'll be able to strengthen your ability to create your own butterflies, as well as interpret the butterflies that you see that inspire you. The other artists have painted, so let's go ahead and get started 5. Step 1 - Shape: the first decision we make when painting a butterfly is what shaped to use, and we all know the shape of a butterfly. It's It's the two wings even, you know, a three year old can draw a picture of a butterfly, but it's it's amazing the difference in feeling that you will get from your butterfly by even the subtle ist changes to the shape. Here you can see we have these very elegant oval top wings and then a triangle shape for the bottom wings. But the most important part is that every one of our lines is still drawing. Are I to that center of the face? Now we can do the smallest change, and we filled out this butterfly. We make it a little more round. The top in the bottom wing are very similar shape to each other, and this butterfly feels friendly and simple, and we'll be able to add some detail work. Maybe do you know a bunch of other exciting things on there? But just by widening this and softening those edges, the feeling already has changed a lot. The next shape that I have here, I've gone ahead and I've taken out just a little bit of that top wing and you can see it adds an excitement. There's something different about this butterfly and looks maybe a little more Ferrier. Maybe a little more like a leaf than a butterfly. And these sharper points are our new. But you can see that the overall shape you know, especially if we have that body in the antenna, is still very butterfly. But it gives us again a different feeling. So this shape is different from any of the others. We have the sharper lying down on the bottom, and then our top is nice and round. But again, our lines are all going in the same place. This one looks very dramatic. You, you know, might paint this on a woman. That's Eddie Gala or something. Um, the cool thing about butterfly wings as well is as you're looking for, what's a new shape? Any of the butterflies you do that you like, you can turn them upside down and you can see this is a very different feeling of a butterfly by just reversing those shapes. Our last one here is similar to the 1st 1 It's a very basic shape, but they has these very small wings on the bottom, and the top one is a little larger. It has a little bit more of a point feeling it's not just grounded. Um, this is one of my favorite shapes to paint when I'm doing butterflies, and by keeping these wings small, it opens up a lot of skin for us to add details, Um, which I really like having that freedom. So as you can see these air just five very similar but still unique shapes that already by making any one of these decisions, the way that these butterflies are going to turn out is already taking off in different directions. And so, for your first decision, kind of play around with different shapes and figure out the ones that you like. This class is all based on the decisions of making a butterfly, but right here in step one, I want to help any of you that are feeling stressed already to know you could choose any one of these shapes for any one of hundreds of other shapes you could use, and the kid would still be happy. Okay, you are the artist, the kid wants a butterfly, and when you're done, it's going to look like a butterfly. Thes decisions help you to make your best work, but the Children are going to love whatever you dio. So don't get hung up in trying to pick the right one because there is no right one as an artist, whatever we choose is the right one, because art is about making our own choices, so feel empowered, feel excited and try all of them. Be able to express yourself in many different ways, and the more you practice, the more your individual style is going to come out. 6. Step 2 - Color: Now that we've taken the time to choose the shape that we're gonna paint, we need to decide what color we want to use, and a lot of times will just ask the kid. He wants your favorite color, and that works great to a point. But we want to make sure that we remember we're the artist, and we want to look at what color the kids were wearing, what color their hair is. If there's a holiday around the corner, if it's Christmas, you know, we want to make sure that we're incorporating whatever colors are going to make this butterfly look its absolute best. So if the little girl is wearing frozen shirt but her favorite colors pink, I might choose a color like this that has the pink. That's her favorite. But then it also has these nice frozen colors. Over here. You want to pay attention to the method that we're going toe, apply the color. We can choose rainbow cake like this that will be applied with a sponge. We can choose a one stroke cake that will put on with a brush, or we might choose to use a mica powder or a star blends. If we're going to be doing a lot of detail work on the top, it could be nice to have a dry powder base. So let's look at the differences in applying some of those colors. I always spray my sponge instead of my paint. I find that if I spray my paint, the water will run in pool and it will create gray on the corners that sometimes get into the main body of the butterfly. And I don't like that you want to just keep wiping until you start to feel the resistance. And that's when you know that the water has really sucked up a lot of paint. Now, when I apply with a sponge, I like to squeeze wherever I'm applying the color and for a butterfly, I do it in two parts. The first part is going to be right here in the corner of the eye, So have them close their eyes and then you just want attack. I'll often tell the kids, let me know if I'm pushing too hard just so that they're aware that I'm going to be pushing a little bit on top of that. So you put down that first layer of color. Then I move my fingers back on the sponge toe where I'm applying next and I go ahead and I applied. Now, if I wanted a lot more pink in this butterfly, I can go ahead and I'm bouncing right here, and I can bounce that pink as far up as I want, and then maybe I don't want the white as much, and I could even flip it if I wanted to. Um, and we could do the blue and then end in the group on the bottom wing. You can keep the same order of colors, or you can do it. The other rate. We can dio a nice little pink bottom wing, a little bit of blue Korean on there, or we can keep it in the same orientation and keep the pink in the middle and work our way out. Remember the shape that you picked? Did you pick a cute little bottom week, or did you pick a larger and you can see that already? Thes two butterflies are going toe look very different now. Sponging is awesome. It gives you a nen credible blend of color, but it's also a little bit hard to control. You can see here that this line isn't very clean, and we have a little bit of a dip here and goes down as you become more confident with sponging or they make different shaped sponges that can even help you get a really clean line. You can have a cleaner sponge. I usually clean up mine when I'm doing my line work, and I can hide almost any imperfection. But once in a while they'll be something like right here. I don't really like how about looks and you can get just a wet white wrap it around a finger so that you have a nice point and you can just go on that face and you can clean up anything and make it a nice sharp line. Don't go crazy with this cause again. This is just a base. But if you decide that you don't like how large that bottom wing turned out, you can just come and get rid of any extra. My only warning about this would be if it is humid and the kids already sweaty. Adding more water to the face is going to make your job harder, but other than that, this can be a really useful technique. If you're struggling with your shape, go ahead and use a shape guide like the ones I showed you and put it underneath what you're practicing on. Or if you're practicing on a real person, you can go ahead with white and just kind of map out the shape that you want to use. The next thing I want to show you is how to apply your base color. If you want to do it in a one stroke fashion, I will often do a double load when I am laying down a base for a massacre butterfly and what that looks like. It's the first time you load a one stroke brush. You have a lot of color up in the first half of your bristles and then not very much down here. But you have a water that it is still down in these bristles. So what I'll do is I will suck out the water off the top of those bristles. Then I will dip my already loaded brush just a little bit. Then I'll just touch it lightly and suck out some of that water now it's already half loaded. I am going to go in and I am going to get a second load. If it's really wet, you can suck out a little bit more of that extra water you can see now instead of halfway loaded. It's loaded almost all the way to the Pharaoh, and that will let you paint your entire butterfly in a single load. Whichever color you want to use on your outside, just make sure it stays on the outside. So we're going to use the corner of this. We're gonna lay it down, come up, follow around and come over and go ahead and ask that could to close their eyes, sweep across the I and then come down to the bottom and used to a nice pedal shape for that bottom wing on this other side. Let me show you what the blue looks like on the outside. So we're using that corner toe way down. Come up. I try and always cover. The eyebrow is kind of my goal. Come down to the corner of the eye. They were gonna flip it around. Go ahead. Ask him to close their eyes. Swoop across the I and filling whenever little corner you have left, then down on him. Here we can get a little more adventurous. We can come into a peak and maybe do a little round than at one more little pink coming up . Fill in whatever we missed most times, I will either sponge or brush the base color. But once in a while I'll decide that I want to add a little bit of stenciling to it as well . So you'll want to just lay down your stencil. Hold it pretty firm. And I ask the kid, Teoh, you know, kind of pushback as I pushed so that I keep good traction. You want to use a very dry paint going on so that you don't move around that bottom layer too much. Just a nice extra texture to our color layer. So stenciling is awesome. Once in a while, I'll be painting on a teenager or a woman, and they have beautiful eye makeup already done, and I don't want to mess with that. So I just want to add color up here and under the eye, and when I do that, I often use a mica powder or a star blends and just get that little extra bit of color and added on there, just, you know, with your finger with an applicator, just add a little bit of extra color toe, whatever makeup they already have on their or if it's ah ah, hot day and somebody wants a monarch butterfly or something, and I know I'm gonna have to do a lot of bitter work. I'll often use a colored base. So this is just the star blends right here, and I'll often use this just to give me that base shape that then I can do all the detail work over the top of. Now that you have your base shaped chosen and you've added your color, we're ready to move on to your third decision. 7. Step 3 - Edgework: this'll is my favorite step. I love this part because I love lying work. And so I'm gonna show you a few different techniques that you can use that really bring out fabulous butterflies. So the 1st 1 I am going to use 1/2 inch angled brush. Um and I'm gonna load it up here with some blue. We're gonna first draw line with the sharpest edge up here with the dark blue from this top corner all the way down to that centre right there. Then we're gonna lay the brush down a little bit and get us a nice corner. And we can do the biggest sweep we want. Or we can do a tiny little sweet whatever shape you want. But the most important part of any journey, any lines, any whatever is where you begin and where you end this point is very important. And this point is very important. Do a nice clean ending stroke to that wing. And now what I do in the middle of doesn't matter. I can do a bump. I can do a wiggle, but it's gonna be much easier for me to replicate the wing on the other side because I start in one place, I end in one place and then I just feel in the middle. It's really important that we don't block the eye on butterfly wings. Most of the detail is always on this outer edge, and if we bring a line now, you'll notice all of these lines are continuing to the center point like we like. But if we bring a line right here on top of the eyelid, it will be pretty jarring to the Observer. So you'll notice that in any of my demos, this part usually ends pretty clean. So go ahead. We'll add another strike down here and bring in a little line there. I'm gonna do some eyeliner. I like to go ahead and just do some nice wisps. Another edge work technique that could be really nice. It's to use teardrops, and there's two different ways that you can go about painting a teardrop. You can pull a line and then slowly lay down, or you can lay your brush down and then slowly pull it up. If you twist as you pull up, that's what gives you that very thin. Nice point. But again, the important thing is where you begin and where you end the load is going to be essential . You wanna use ah lot of water and work it really well till it's super creamy and nice. Whenever you're painting, you use the very tip of your brush, and so sometimes, if you use the tip of your brush to paint, you'll get a brighter white on either side of the line, and then you'll get this kind of like thin white that showing the color from underneath in the middle. And what causes that is that you're using the power of the point of your brush to scrape off the paint that you're trying so hard to lay down. So the point of your brush that you actually want to paint with is just above the center point. So when you're doing a tear, drop her. You're doing a line. You want to start your line with that nice point, but then you want to lay your brush down because that's going to be a nice soft transition for the paint to flow right off of your brush and on to the kids face, and then you can use the point of your brush to pick it back up. So let's remember, we need to know where we're starting where we stop and we're gonna lay a teardrop right down here and roll the brush up to get a nice little flick. I will also go back into this same teardrop and pick it up so that we have a nice, thin to thick to thin line. Now we can start our next line right off of that original one and do a little flick here and we're gonna do a high liner. Then I'm gonna bring a little teardrop in right to the corner of that I Then we'll just bring this up and curl it. And don't be afraid to draw over a stencil line. And you can do this in any color you want, You can do it and why you could do it in black. You can do it, you know, And the navy blue would be pretty. But you can see these have this really nice edge to Are we now, if we wanted to do it much more following these round shapes that we have from that stenciling, we totally can. We can come in here and then just do a bunch of teardrops and you can see that that reflects that shape really well. But it looks a little imbalanced because we have these sharp points and tear drops into your drops. So what we can do now is we can just pick a couple of those teardrops to add a nice little 0.2 and then maybe even bring a little backside. And then if we want Teoh, we can add just a few little dots, any little areas that we feel like I need a little extra. There you go. That's a beautiful edge. Let's take a look at just a couple other techniques. While that paint is still wet, I am gonna grab a brush that doesn't have any pain on it at all. And I can go ahead and I can fuzz that line. Let's just get this really awesome shaded technique. I really like to pull a line from the outside here. Now we have our starting her stops, and we can bring in a lying here and connected role of teardrops. Often I'll have the person open their eye for these. If your brushes damp, you can even fuzzy after it's dried, but I find it much easier to do that before some really clean little teardrops here. Anyway, it's hard to stop. It's very hard to stop. We can add that beginning line and then just bouncing. Thes little edge is giving us a really nice feathered exterior, and then we can come in and add the's beautiful lines that you could also do this with a round brush. If that's more comfortable for you, it looks feathery. It looks natural. It just looks beautiful. So there is no beginning or no end to the number of different edge works that you can come up with. Any technique that you use to do spots on a tiger or to do leaves can then be used and translated into a butterfly. So all we're looking to do an edge work is we want to create a clean line from the outside of the butterfly to the inside of the butterfly. 8. Step 4 - Body: we've chosen our shape. We've picked our color, we've laid down our base and then we've added our edge work, and you can see these already look like butterflies. Bo, what's missing is the happy little fellow that lives in the middle. And so the next decision that you need to make is what the body or the center of your butterfly is going to be. We can add a nice little curl that comes down here and we can add to antenna. You could make it as simple as, Ah, little strike and then have the antenna. We can have antenna that come up and curl. We can have antenna that cross. Ah, whole bunch of times in the middle there, so many choices. But what the body says is it tells you a lot about this butterfly. If you have incredible wings and you want to focus on the wings, choose a very simple butterfly center. If you have a small child and you have a little bit of extra time, you can lay down kind of a caterpillar shape and you can see the possibilities are endless . Get to know what it is that looks successful to you. The reason that this decision is choosing the body or the center is that butterflies are the gateway to whimsical designs, and it can be as simple as adding a little tiara shape in the center that can lift your butterfly into a mask. And all of a sudden, every technique that you've learned in this butterfly class has now become a mask or fairy or a princess. Okay, let's say some time and look at 10 different butterfly bodies. This is just three teardrops, a nice little head, a few little strikes down, and then a teardrop coming up, a couple of curls, a wave, and then we'll do a thicker wave, then grow back up. Go around on the inside, keep it simple on the Internet, little tiny teardrop and then a little tiny one coming back up and then a diamond shaped for the head and maybe a little doc down on the bottom. Kind of follow around like that, you know, and we could even fill this kind of the head shape here and then sign there. Let's do so overlapping and technically, you can even just do the antenna. Men may be just a little doctor. Doodling bodies like this could be really helpful, cause you can discover designs that you never would have done on the job. This looks really good when you're doing a profile and you're only doing the wings on one side. Let's do a dotted body here, tear drop down here at the bottom. Remember, a teardrop is just the beginning if you want it to be. So from there, we can come up and kind of curve around heavy and then do a nice little legal down. Now, let me show you what's really fun about practicing like this. You can see which one's your favorite like. Okay, how do I like that one? Let's move on. Ooh, I like that one a lot better than that one. So you can see that this is a work in progress and will use one body for a long time. And then I'll get tired of it and I'll try a different one. And all the sudden that will become my new favorite, you can see with the exact same wings. The simple is changing. That body completely changed the feeling of that butterfly 9. Step 5 - Bling & Shadow: now, adding bling is like the highlight of the butterfly. It is what brings the butterfly out. But death is created by both, bringing things out and setting things behind. And that's why your fifth decision, when making a butterfly is your bling and your shadow. This is where you really have the opportunity to add a ton of detail and liven up your designs. I have a few different products to introduce you to right now, Really big in the industry are these chunky glitters. Chunky glitter is just a bunch of different sizes of glitter pieces suspended in like an al a Vera gel, and to apply it, all you have to do is just wipe across and put it right onto the face. You want to be careful not to add chunky glitter on the top of paint because it will just smear your paint. So this often looks really good, but across the top or down on the site. But I also love to do that with a loose mica powder. It just makes the butterfly look like it's flying through the golden sunset. You can just kind of, you know, go on, rub it onto the skin. When you're looking to add glitter to the pain itself, I recommend either adding a loose glitter. Or you can add ah, liquid bling, which is where they've taken similar to the chunky glitter, the olive air gel based on Lee. They make it in like a pen or a bottle with a tip. It adds a three dimensional look to your butterfly, and that can be absolutely beautiful. Another thing I like to use as I like to use lip gloss that I can just put right over top of their lips and then by using a loose glitter that I can just squeeze and sprinkler. I could make the bling lips, which again is just one more way that you can add Ling Tau a butterfly. Let me show you how we can shade some of these butterflies. No, I've loaded my brush up with some pretty purple and anywhere that you see these white lines . We can go ahead, and we can add either some teardrops or even just somethin defective in lines. The ads Just another layer again. We're looking to create this depth feeling that could be so beautiful, even if we just add a little touch on the edges here, but you can see that makes this design more complex. Now, if you have a dark color like this blue, you can also do this with a white. Of course, this looks more like a highlight than a shadow. Now, now what you want to do when you're deciding where to put these details? We all know that there is a point at which you've done too much and it's awesome to spend time practicing on these face mats because then you can recognize I like to the butterfly better before I did that. Okay, that is my point where I go too much. One of the tools that we need to develop is the ability to recognize a picture that we don't particularly care for and identify why we don't like it. It will strengthen your ability to succeed if you can also strengthen your perspective on what failure looks like to you in your art. These two white teardrops right here I probably don't need those. And how do you know if I like those white ones very much? I might, though, want toe highlight that a little bit more over here that has way too much going on. If I were to do it again, I probably wouldn't add the purple or maybe leave the purple, but not at the pink. It's really good to be able to go back and look at your own work and decide. Do I like the way that turned out or what? I take the opportunity to change it. I love the bottom wing. I think it's beautiful. This top wing, the island. To me, it's perfect. It looks gorgeous, but right here I feel like it's a little empty. In a watercolor painting class I took, I've learned that you should always have three shapes. You should have a bomb, a bear, Papa bear in a little baby baron. So right here you can see we just have to shapes. So by adding a little shape right there, Now we've cut this one down. It's a little smaller than that one, and we have this little tiny shape right there, and it just gives us this really nice dimension. And it was a small thing to add, but can you see how much more life there is in this butterfly? So take the time. Look at your old work and say I could have done that better. Or look at your old workers that I did that great. And by building this awareness of yourself and your own preferences, you're going to be able to build your success. 10. Symmetry: symmetry can be really challenging when painting butterflies, because whatever we've done on one side, we want to go ahead and repeat on the other. But what you have to realize is that a face is symmetrical already on its own. Whatever's on this side is going to be on that side. So what I want to teach you is I want to teach you to provide symmetry based on landmarks. So we have this CenterPoint that is going to kind of identify that access of symmetry. Then we have either side of the eyebrow that can be useful. We have either side of the eyes that can be useful. We have No, I don't. Because this is a practice face. But on a real face, you have a really beautiful cheekbone. And so I will often identify the two sides of the cheekbone right there and right there. From this point to this point, if we continue the straight line, where would it go to the top of the eyebrow? And that becomes another point that we can access. We have from this point to this point, we go up to the top of the other eyebrow in this line, you can look at the top of years. You can look at the bottom of the ears. You can look at the inside of the nose is a point that we often use That top of the lip is used now not in butterflies, typically, but the outside of the mouth. We have all of these landmarks that give us thes points of symmetry. So what I'm gonna dio is I am going to train, connect this landmark to that landmark and cover as much of the eyebrow as I can and then hit this landmark. So here I go. We go from this point up to that point, then we come down and around and we curvature out. I don't even have to look at that shape to be able to repeat it by just following those same landmarks. So we go from this point up to that point down and around to that landmark go across the I cover again, come out to that landmark down to that one and up up to that landmark down to that one. Flip your brush and had a number. And there you go. We've created a similar shape on either side without having to go back and forth and back and forth. Now with the line work, we have the same ease of not trying to replicate based on looking and what did it over here . What did I do? What did I dio weaken? Just recreate the same process. I doing it that way. You will end up having a symmetrical design, but there won't be as much pressure. One last thought on symmetry is that cemetery actually isn't critical Here we have a very simple, symmetrical design. But let me show you how much fun it can be to have it not be symmetrical. Maybe you're doing a best friend design. So you put some letters in the bottom wings. Or maybe we want to come out here and add some fun swooping, detailed lines and you can try and make them symmetrical. But I think it's so much more pretty to be ableto let the lines live for themselves and you can see the feeling is balanced. But the design is not perfectly symmetrical For me, this side of the face is much easier to paint than this side. And we tend to want to paint whatever sites easier first, but if you campaign the side of the face that you find more awkward first, then the easier side is the side that you end up trying to match. Had I painted this one first and then come over here, I can't even see that one to try and paint it's match. So go ahead and practice painting your non dominant side first, and that can also help you with your cemetery. 11. The Blueprint: Those are our five decisions. With every butterfly we paint with every butterfly anyone paints, they choose the shape, the color, the edge work the body or center of the design. And then what? They want to add bling in shadow at the end, and that's what it takes. But what is it that that leads thes choices That helps us make these decisions, And that is what we're going to call our blueprint. So the first question we have is who is this being painted on? And we're gonna grab some info from our client. The next thing that we're gonna look at is how much time do we have? Are we somewhere where we have two minutes? Boom. Get it done, Or is this something where we have 45 minutes? Because they're trying to win a costume contest? The last thing that goes onto this list is what I like to call the balance. We're looking for balance and the things that we're trying to balance our we trying to make a basic butterfly or are we wanting one that is super unique? Are we looking to make ah colorful butterfly or do we want to make a monochrome because you know, this person's costume is all shades of black and white. Are we looking to have a very clean design, or do we want a butterfly that looks really messy? Are we looking to make a butterfly that is very realistic? Or is this a fantasy whimsy design? In order to be successful with this plan, what shape will work best? What color will work best? What kind of edge work will we use? What is the body, your center and how much blinking shadow can we do? And with that plan in place, success is right around the corner. 12. Scaling Back: as much as we might wish that every kid that wants about her fight once that's not really true. You get a lot of little kids that the mom just wants it on their cheek or they want up over one eye. And so it could be really useful to take all the skills that we've been talking about learning and look at how they apply on a smaller scale. So the four different levels of butterflies that you wanna also be able to do is you want to be able to do a cheek butterfly on armed butterfly, a butterfly up over one eye and then also a background butterfly. And these air, one of my favorites, were all used to doing little sparkles and stars. And maybe we even go into hearts, you know, as the background of a different image. Or we throw a rainbow in there. But by adding butterflies using the exact same techniques, it could be amazing what it does for an image. When you're painting a butterfly on the arm, it's so much fun. You have none of the restrictions that you have on the face. You don't have to deal with the nose. You don't have to deal with eyes. You know the mouth isn't gonna get in your way. Go ahead and just paint that butterfly the way that you wish you always could. All that I would say is instead of using a number four or number six round brush, hop down to a number two or a zero, and then you can do the execs ing movements with your arms and your hands on Lee, they will be miniaturized when you're painting 1/2 butterfly. It's really important to remember that you're doing a butterfly in profile, if that makes sense. And so some of the things that you might not think about but they can really help the butterfly look comfortable is make sure that you tuck a second wing behind there. If you just paint half of the mask that you always do, it's not gonna look right. So you want to paint the second wing, have it be a little bit shorter and a little bit further in, and that gives the perspective feeling also if you imagine you have your butterfly and the intent is air poking up and now you're doing a profile. Your antennas are going to go out forward instead of going out this way. Sometimes we make the mistake of doing the intent is the same way that we do when the butterfly is looking straight on. It's interesting because our brains know so much that we don't know, and so you won't be able to say why it looks wrong, but you'll be able to tell that it looks from when you're painting a butterfly on the cheek . I find it really useful to tilt the butterfly. If you tilt it just a little bit, you have a one way that can come up here and then you have this space to come up here. It lets you get bigger wings, and it's going to be a more impressive design. Don't be afraid to pay the cheek butterfly as big as you can. The parents that want their kids to get cheek butterflies are often the young kids, and those can still have some of those little baby hat cheeks, so make sure you use them and get the biggest wings you can because they could be simply beautiful 13. Demo 1 - The Brush Butterfly: we're gonna do some more typical tutorial style painting. Now I'm gonna walk you through four different butterfly designs that use the exact same steps. But by making different choices at each step, you're going to see how incredibly different these butterflies come out. And I can't wait to share them with you. Here's the brush, butterfly. Now I call the brush butterfly because I paint it using only paintbrushes. When I first started face painting, my daughter would suck on the sponges of when she was nine months old and I hated it. And so I hit the sponges and I didn't use them for a couple of years. I you know, I think it's a mistake to not use a tool, but I actually learned how to do a lot with paintbrushes. So we're gonna go through, and I'm gonna show you this amazing butterflied that I use all the time. The thing I love about the brush butterfly is that we're able to get this shape exactly the way we want it from the very beginning. Using a flat brush to put in the shape that we want, you're able to get a very beautiful, crisp top wing and then a really nice little tucked. Bottom way I love using soft colors for the brush butterfly because my preferred color of choice for the edge work is black. By picking these nice, pretty colors, they just shine through, but they don't compete while we go around the edge. Work of this butterfly. We use a mixture of teardrops curls that are all very flexible. Your ableto follow the lines that you've created while accenting different shapes here and there, and you're able to create little pockets of blue and pockets of purple. And you can just, you know, crisp up those barriers that the one stroke gives you. Once you're working on the edge work, it's really important to focus on where you're going to put different little details. You don't want to have any clashing areas, and so you'll notice that I try and keep any movement lines along the same lines that have already been drawn. So if my one stroke was curving, my teardrops will probably be curving. They're really nice to to use the brush butterfly if you're just starting out on doing full face butterflies because it gives you a really clean edge to follow, and you don't have to create that border by yourself for the body of this butterfly. I like to use the same load that I've used on the edge work I even tried mirror the wing design on the antenna. The bling in shadow for this butterfly is super simple. All we have to do is add a little bit of white highlights here and there, and some sparkle to finish it off in some glitter lips. It's really beautiful. The reasons I love this butterfly is because of how fast it is. You only have to load a couple of brushes in order to go from beginning to end on this butterfly were all really used to seeing dots on butterflies, but by making them in a line, it gives this direction that we're not used to seeing. And it's really fun throwing a few little sparkle stars and some little dots and color those lips up. And it's absolutely beautiful. I love this butterfly, and I really hope that you try it out and see if it's one that you love to 14. Demo 2 - The Sponge Butterfly: sponge butterfly is probably one of the most popular. It's so funny because it lets you have that immediate impact. You get that rainbow sponge and boom, it's on the face. So here, in this demonstration, we're going to look at kind of the maximum impact butterfly. The sponging lets you go on more or less kind of. I think this is where I want my butterfly. But then the shape comes as you chisel in these beautiful outlines with your edge work. I love the way that the color just goes right on and starts yelling I am a butterfly from the very beginning. This design is one as I'm doing my blueprint that I love to pull out for little kids. It lets you get a beautiful butterfly feeling right at the very beginning. And if they get wiggly, you can stop while you're going in and adding this edge work. You want to get ready for where your body is going to end up. You want to leave plenty of space right there in the middle that we can draw something beautiful here. Coming up on this butterfly is perfect because you can go in and continue to add an ad, an ad and layer and layer, and all of these details come together into a beautiful butterfly. Getting the two sides to match up is really quite easy, since we just keep doing these little swoop, swoop, swoop, add in each end and then Philemon using the same colors are edge. Work is wonderful on this butterfly to put in the body in just four easy strokes. You have a body that matches this butterfly perfectly as we go in and we add the highlight , and bling and shadow were able to see these beautiful teardrops just fit anywhere we can throw in some curls. We can throw in some swirls and we just get this vibrant looking butterfly to look mawr and more detailed. You'll find that you can't stop painting these butterflies. They are so exciting. I love the way that the layering just adds to this feeling of free nous in this butterfly. Don't be afraid to have your lines cross over each other every now and then. It's nice to have them all packed in really tight, but by having those lines that can cross over and touch, it just gives them a little bit more stability as we're doing the other side. It's important to kind of pay attention to where the details are landing to make sure that even if we're not going for perfect cemetery, we are getting the feeling consistent throughout the entire butterfly. What's throw in a few of those sparkle stars that we're all in love with and start to get this finished? Look coming. The bling we wanna go ahead and add is just that beautiful dusting of some sparkle. Get some nice glitter going on on the lips and just feel yourself falling in love with this beautiful butterfly. I love to go in at the end and just take a look at any place that I feel I could just use that extra little bit and here I absolutely love these teardrops. 15. Demo 3 - The Stencil Butterfly: the Rosen Stencil Butterfly demonstration is one where we get Teoh, investigate and experiment with some different techniques. We're gonna add some flowers to a butterfly as well as use a stencil toe. Add just a little bit more texture to the wings that we can do with just sponges and paintsil. The shape of this butterfly is going to be one that's a little more diffuse. We want the feeling of a butterfly. We want to have this the look of butterfly wings through the trees in the soft glow on a morning we just add in this beautiful butterfly shape, but with these light colors that fade into the skin, adding this stencils texture is giving us that look of the modelled light that comes through the trees. I love to use thes shapes and these feelings when I'm painting on a girl that has a beautiful dress on at maybe a wedding or a garden party. And so we're looking to give her the feeling that perhaps, you know, she was she was touched by a butterfly or by a fairy, and that she has some of these feelings inside of her. Before we finish the butterfly I want to go ahead and I want to start working on this Rose crown. Now we're mixing these two designs together because they bring so much life to this beautiful soft face. The colors for this butterfly are ones that we're using that are very natural colors that we could find right outside in our flower garden any day. Beautiful pings and wides. We're gonna put in some greens here in just a minute, and they're all going to blend together to just have this very natural, beautiful feeling. Sometimes when I'm painting, I like to mix my colors right on the palate and that's very familiar to us. But we can also do that when we're loading are one strokes here. I've added just a little bit of blue onto my brush before I loaded up green. And that gives me a darker green to just contrast at toe. Add a little bit of sharp edge to these leaves that kind of define these air, the flowers and thes air, the butterfly wings. I absolutely love the way that this base layer can just be added on by thes flowers and it gives us this feeling of life growing just the way that roses do twine and grow up. You can use those little sprigs to just accent any of the lines that we want, but without having to have something as harsh is a teardrop, she's wispy little lines that kind of go into nowhere. When we're doing the detail work on the roses, we want to make sure that we're getting a really creaming consistency and just go ahead and add in these little strikes going around and around, adding just one mawr element to this beautiful design later will use that same thick white into the wings to pull it all together. Once we're finished up, adding the dots to this rose, we want to think about our edge work. We have these very light boundaries from the edge of the face to the wings, and we want to add a little bit more definition. So let's use some of the techniques from our last butterfly. But instead of having them be as strong, let's just keep him really light strikes again. We're going for the way. The little girl's dress might have layers of ruffle and lace. We can even use the same colors of the flower echoed in these beautiful light, feathery wings. Harry, bring in some more white dots. Now. Dots are often used as accent pieces, but we can also use them if we just trail him in these lines to kind of define the different areas of the wings. It's another way to just say this is a butterfly, baby, but it's moving so faster it's, you know, seen so far away that we can't quite see it. So we're just adding these little white details to give it that faint fairy like butterfly essence. I love the way that, as this butterfly is one that we're trying to pull in bits of nature, those little dots almost feel a little bit like dewdrops that or maybe on the edges of a leaf or on a spider's web. And I'm adding in these little wispy lines at the end, that kind of look like the light is catching the little edges of grass we can add in this beautiful gold shimmery mica powder. For our bling on this design to just feel like golden sunlight coming through an ad in a very faint glitter lip color here with the gold to just say I am a butterfly. So much fun 16. Demo 4 - The Tribal Butterfly: e wanted to add one butterfly on here for a little bit of the older crowd, whenever you're painting at a club or a bar, or you just have a teenager that walks into your booth and the little sisters getting a butterfly and they really want she really wants her big sister to match. But you can tell that that teenager isn't quite buying, but you know, pink and sparkly. So I went ahead and I mixed a little bit of a tribal infusion into this a butterfly demonstration, and I had a blast with it. I also went ahead, and I demoed the new chunky glitter that we're all falling in love with on DSO, I tried to keep this butterfly little hip. See what you think. Working with adults, I have found that less is often more. I love in this butterfly the way that we're focusing on the top half of the wing. The color that I picked is very bright and bold adults. They fall into one of two camps. They are either. Oh my gosh, Are you sure I can do this? And and for those adults I love to keep things a little bit more traditional, but you get the adults that are like I am getting my face painted. You can't tell me I'm too old and they've got this sass. And for those adults thes air, the colors, these air the lines. You want something to just yell. I am not afraid, toe have my face painted, and that's what I feel like this butterfly is doing. The's tribal lines that we're using for the edge work are so precise, and they're so clean that they just aren't afraid at all. When you are afraid, your lines Comptel, I swear. It's like they say Dogs can smell fear. So can lines. And you want to either study tribal and practice until you get really comfortable. Or you want to find tribal lines that you really love. And then just use those lines and you can create like your tribal comfort zone. The body on this butterfly that we decided to go with is very simple. Don't focus on me. Focus on what else is going on now. Like I said, we did a lot of detail work on the top wing, this bottom wing. We're just throwing in some chunky glitter by adding the chunky glitter. First, we give it a chance to dry a little bit before we go in to add a little more definition. Were able to mirror that feeling of chunky glitter by using an iridescent chunky glitter on top that doesn't attract the eyes. So much is it just complements the over are all feeling. Once we feel like that bottom is set, we can go ahead and paint right around. You don't want to pay on top of the chunky glitter, but by giving that glitter a boundary, it really gives a nice feeling of Oh my gosh, this is a wing and the power that comes from those sparkles it adds movement. The way in actual butterfly would go ahead and add something underneath the eyes. Add those white lines ad that bling and shadow that's going to just say, I'm finished. Somebody loves me. This blue color, I thought, was awesome because it just brings out those blue tones down on the bottom. This show somebody who said yes, paint my face 17. Finding Inspiration: one of the hardest questions for me that people ask is so are you an artist? And when they first started asking me that I was brand new to face painting, I felt so tourney, Do I say yes, Do I say no on? I can give you permission to say absolutely yes, in whatever words you want to use Face painters are artists for sure, but often we keep ourselves separate from the other artistic world. We buy their supplies in special face paint shops. We sell our wares at kid carnivals instead of at a typical art fair. So one of the things we can do is face painters is we can look at other mediums for inspiration. Here is a dreamscapes book that's about fairies and mermaids and angels. But if you look inside, they have this amazing page that talks about wings, and they have these that look very much like butterflies that aren't the perfectly normal shape. We add this little extra detail here. We add this beautiful line over here, or we get three wings instead of just two, and all of these ideas we can learn from it we can grow from, but If you're really looking for some easy inspiration for butterfly face painting, what better place to look than other face painters? Here in this section, I want to introduce to you seven of my favorite face painters that have inspired me on my own butterfly journey. We have Nadine Davidson and her butterflies are absolutely beautiful. I feel like she fits the child's face better than almost anybody I've ever seen. This picture that I selected of her butterfly is one that you can see. She lines with these black teardrops and then just follows with the simple loops by making them follow the colors that she's laid down. It's a very simple process, but the yields stunning results. Stephanie Kendall is a face painter from New Zealand. Look at all the different colors of blue and green that all blend together perfectly, but still bring out this beautiful butterfly feeling. I also love the way that she used minimal white effects, as well as just some more traditional butterfly shapes that really felt very free, and that blue in the lipstick really pulls it all together. Ronnie Mena is an amazing line work artist, so his pictures they have a sense of peace for me, and I picked this one because I wanted you guys to see how having command of crisp clean lines is all you need on top of color. It's very simple. There isn't a lot of highlight and shadow. I don't even know if their sparkles on this butterfly, but still it has impact. It has power nerds work. I'm still reaching to try and capture and understand the beauty in her butterflies. I love the color choice that she does. The edge work is so beautiful. I feel like I am looking at a real butterfly when I look at near its work. Laura Oliver's work is absolutely fabulous. I love her sense of color. She is somebody that I look Teoh when I am looking for a way to incorporate Ah lot into a small space and have it feel alive. I've loved the way that her the palate just packs a punch. Denise Cold is an absolutely stunning painter. I know that it's not a typical butterfly, but it shows how the butterfly wing shape can pull into this beautiful fairy mask. I love the use of one stroke with the teardrops and then the flowers. I feel like you can see those layers bringing elegance but dainty but vibrant. I mean, it's it's just a stunning picture. Layla Shemesh is amazing painter, but I felt like this one in particular had the minimalist asymmetry that is still so powerful. I feel like this face painting gives you, ah, full face feeling, but without needing to paint the entire face, I think that she doesn't absolutely wonderful job using some more adult colors and still making it magical, almost regal and still simple. It's amazing. I love being able to share my work, but I just want to say a quick thank you to all of the artists that have freely shared their work. Over the course of the years that I've been a face painter to these seven and then tow all the others, I didn't have a chance to mention the free sharing of beautiful face Painting in our industry really helps build and grow this really magical special thing that we're all a part of 18. The Project: Okay, so now that you have seen several of my butterflies, I really, really, really want to see one of yours. So for the project, I have three things that I need you to Dio. I want you to post a picture of a butterfly that you've paid it. If you want to do a before and after picture and love, those also list one thing from this class that really you had never heard before. I love to know what things really stand out and what things help you. The third part of the project is to share a face painter that you love with all of us. I took you through some of my favorite butterfly painters and I would love to know some of yours. So go ahead and post a picture of a butterfly. Pull something you learn from this class and share one of your favorite place pictures with us, and we will all grow together. Thanks so much. Guys.