Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello. Have you always
wanted to be able to paint, but were never
quite brave enough or just didn't really
know where to start? Well, my name is
Sherri, and today, I'm going to help you paint
this beautiful butterfly, even or especially if you've
never painted before.
2. Tools and Materials: So let's look at everything
we're going to use today. So first up, you'll
need a canvas. Any size canvas and even any shape canvas
will do just fine. You'll also need some
paint brushes, of course, and there are three
paint brushes I recommend for this painting. My large green brush here
is called a Philbert brush. You can see if you
look at it one way, it's wide and it's
slightly rounded, and if you look at it another
way, it's quite narrow. We'll be using this brush
for most of our painting. And we also have
two round brushes. So one larger one
and one smaller one. We'll use these for some
of the finer detail work. Now, you'll obviously
need some paint. I'll be using purple,
white, black and gold. You'll need your
butterfly template. You can, of course,
free hand it, but the templates there so
that you don't have to. You'll need a palette
for your paint, and a disposable plate or a ceramic plate
will do just fine. And a cloth for you to wipe your paintbrush on
whenever you need. You'll also need a pencil
and also a jar of water. Any old jam jar will do.
3. Step 1: The Background: Okay, so grab your
paper plate palette and your white and purple paint. Now, what you're going to do
is you're going to dish out some white paint for yourself and then three
shades of purple. Okay? So one of those shades can be the dark purple
straight from the tube. But then the other two shades, you're going to mix the
white and the purple to get two different
shades of light purple. Now, it doesn't matter how
light or how dark these are, as long as they're visibly
different from each other, so that when you're
finished mixing them, you can see three
different shades, like three obviously different shades of purple on your plate. Okay, so we're going to start
painting the background. We're not even gonna think about the butterfly at this stage. So grab your white paint and
just slop it on your canvas. You're going to cover your
canvas with this white paint. And you want it on fairly
thick, as well, okay? 'Cause in a minute,
we're going to add some other colours, and
we're gonna blend them. So you can't blend dry paint. So, particularly
if the weather's quite warm or you've got a fan on or air conditioner
or a heater on nearby, the paint might dry
fairly quickly. So put it on reasonably
thick, like butter on toast. You'll notice, as well,
that all my brush strokes are going in the same direction. So I've got my canvas
set landscape, and my brush strokes
are going Up and down. Your entire background
is going to be painted with your brush
strokes going up and down. So even though it
doesn't really matter, while you're just
painting white, try and get in the habit of it now. Next, you're just going to
paint random streaks of purple over your wet
white background. It doesn't matter what colors. It doesn't matter
how many. You can just have a few.
You can have a lot. You can have big strokes
or little strokes. Just don't be scared
and don't overthink it. Just bang that paint on there. Now, don't worry about
cleaning your brush. You want a thin layer of
white paint on your brush. So not a big blob like
we've been doing before, but just paint like paint into the plate until you've got
a thin layer on your brush. And then starting from the
left and moving to the right, you're going to paint all the way from the top to the bottom, all the way from the
left to the right. You're going to paint
through the white. You're going to
paint through all the purple bits
that you've added. And it's going to wonderfully
smear all of the paint together so you
get this fabulous streaky sort of background. We're going to repeat
that last step now. So give your brush
a bit of a clean. Doesn't have to be
100% and then dab it off on the cloth so that you get most of the moisture
out of the brush. Pick up another thin
layer of the white paint, so not a big gold blob, but just a nice thin layer. And just repeat that process, all the way from
left to the right, going all the way from
the top to the bottom, and you can see it
smooths it out again. Now, you can repeat
this process as many times as you feel
your painting needs. But the more you do it, the more of those streaks
you're going to lose, okay? So keep that in mind. Now, grab your gold paint, and we're just going to add a little bit of gold
to this background. So pick it up. A couple of streaks
here and there. Don't have to go overboard. We're just adding a
little bit of contrast. Then you can see I didn't
worry about washing my brush. We'll just pick up another
thin layer of white paint, and we'll repeat that process of brushing it through top
to bottom, left to right. So that's your
background finished. Now, we do want the background dry before we move on
to the next stage, so you can either
leave it to air dry and come back to this
exercise a little bit later, or if you've got a heat
gun or a hair dryer, you can just go and grab
that and dry your paint off. If you're using a heat
gun, don't hold it in one place for too
long because it will burn and bubble the paint.
4. Step 2: Shading the Butterfly: Grab your butterfly
template and your pencil. Have a play around
with your template to decide where you want
the butterfly to sit. I strongly recommend you make your butterfly a
little bit wonky, don't try and
perfectly center it. It just makes a much more
interesting finish painting. Grab your paint palette again. And if you need to, mix some more of your
lightest light purple. It doesn't have to perfectly match the light purple we
used for the background. We're going to use
three shades of purple to colour
in this butterfly, and we're going to start
with the lightest one. So you absolutely do not
have to match your colors. All you need is whatever
color you mix now, your next two shades
are gonna be darker. You're going to use
this color to color in the entire butterfly
that you've just drawn. So you want a decent
amount of paint. Don't stress about it, though. We're going to go over the
top with other colors. So if it turns out that you don't mix enough,
it's not a problem. We're going to go
over the top with so many more layers anyway. So if you have to mix
the more later and the colors don't exactly
match, you won't even notice. So use that color to color in the whole of the butterfly that
you've just drawn. If you want to switch to
one of the round brushes now because you feel more
comfortable, that you can, but trust me when I say
that you'll get a better, crisper line with
this filbert brush. When you paint, the bristles
don't splay on this brush. They stay nice and straight, so they do what
you tell them to. Around brush, when
you press down on it, the bristles all splay. So it can be more challenging to keep
that nice sharp edge. So try and stick with
this filbetush for this. Once you finish the wings, I probably do recommend switching to a small
round brush to colour in the body and the head. A We're now going to use the medium purple color. So again, if you need to
mix some more, that's fine. Again, it doesn't
have to perfectly match the shade that
you mix the last time. All it needs to be is darker than the
light color you just mixed and lighter than the dark purple
straight from the tube. Now, you can see
I've switched to my large round brush to mix because that's the brush I'm going
to use to paint on. So if I'm going to get
paint all up in my brush, I might as well mix with the
brush I'm going to paint. H now, you'll see I just did a bit of a twirly whirl with the brush. So I'm going to show
you that a little bit closer because it'll
be really handy. So when you mix or
you load your brush, you get big blobs of it,
and we don't want that. We want the nice sharp tip back. So lay your brush down almost
horizontal on the plate and just roll it over and that will get
rid of the excess paint, and it will give you your
nice pointy tip back. So for this layer of paint, we're going to start from
the butterfly's body, and we're just going
to flick strokes out towards the outside of
the wing in all directions. Don't reload your
brush too often, let your brush run
dry because we don't want solid finish spots. We eventually want the ends of the flicks to kind of
fade in a little bit. So as your brush
runs out of paint, go back over it and just sort of soften those
edges a little bit. And you don't want to cover the entire wing with this color, you maybe want to get
half to two thirds of it. You do still want to see some of that light color at the base. You do still want
to see some of that through the medium color. One last tip here. Try and
avoid making it too uniform. So have your strokes
different lengths. Some of them will be
fat, some will be thin, some will be shorter,
some will be longer. You don't want a perfect semicircle kind of coming
out of the butterfly's body. Now, clean your brush, load up a small amount of
the plain purple straight from the
tube, the dark purple. Make sure you've got that point, so roll your brush
if you need to. And then we're going to
repeat the last process, but we're going to cover maybe a third two a half of the wing. So we still want to see
the previous two colors. We don't want to
completely cover them up. If your medium purple color
is still a little bit wet, your dark purple may mix in
and fade in a little bit, may not be as dark as we want. So if you need to,
you can just give it a minute and let it dry
and then go over it again, or just keep working over it until it darkens
up a little bit. Doesn't need to be too dark. Remember, keep your strokes
from being too even, like, some longer, some shorter. Randomize them a little
bit as best you can.
5. Step 3: The Butterfly Details: So we're just going to add a few details to the
butterfly wings now, which will add a
little bit of texture, break up some of the
large masses of color, and just make it a little bit
more visually interesting. So we're going to
start with some white. So squeeze out some white on your palate some
fresh clean white, and with a clean
brush, you just want a small amount on the very,
very tip of your brush. Now, we just want a bunch of really random strokes
on this butterfly wing. So try and use the
tip of your brush if you can for some of them so that
they're nice and thin. Others, you can put a
little bit more pressure, and they will be a
little bit fatter. You want some short, some long. You want some close to the body, and you want some closer
to the edge of the wing. So just really random it up. It's okay, too, if some of them are not very bright white, if they just kind of fade
into the purple a little bit. Like, they don't need to
be white tiger stripes or, you know, white zebra stripes. And in fact, I'm softening up some of mine that are a
little bit too bright. And I'm just doing that
by painting back over the bright ones when
the paint that's on my brush has kind
of disappeared. I'm just repainting over the bright ones to fade
them a little bit. It'll lift up some of the
paint again and spread it. So now you can see, I'm repeating the same
process with the purple, the dark purple
straight from the tube. Now, there's no correct
number of stripes here. So it's just whatever you
feel your painting needs. You can see again
that I'm just going over with not a clean brush, but a brush where the paint
has all been painted off. So I'm just going
back over some of those darker purple ones to
soften them a little bit. And now we'll repeat the
process with the gold. Smaller brush here. It's just because the gold is a
little bit thicker, a little bit more difficult
to work with and control. But it honestly doesn't matter. You can use either
round brush for this with all three colors. Once you're happy with
the texture of the wings, it's time to start adding
the final black detail. So square out some
of the black paint, and then we're going to
water it down a little bit to help us get
some nice crisp edges. So use your small
round brush to drip out some clean paint water next to your black paint and mix some of that
painting with that water, just let you mixing two
colors together until you get a more liquid version
of that black paint. Now, roll your brush
on the plate like we've done before to get
your beautiful tip back. 'cause we're gonna want that
pointy tip the first step, we're going to outline
our butterfly wings. If you want to practice this
on a scrap piece of paper or card before you go to
your canvas, feel free. Try and start your line
lightly just using the tip, and then press down so that we can get a nice
thin to thick line. It's not easy, and you may not get it on your first
one, so don't stress, but it is a really cool skill to practice because when you get that, that was
a nice line there. When you get that
nice thin to thick, it just adds a layer of
class to your painting. You can see on some of my lines, I was a little bit
thin or my brush accidentally lifted
off the canvas where I didn't intend it to or it didn't join nicely or I
didn't get the thin to thick. If you have these,
don't try and fix them. Okay, leave them. Lean into it. Fixing them will
probably make it worse. So just leave it and love it as part of
the handmade process. So load up some more black,
some more watery black, if you can, and we're just going to coloring
the body and the head. A So load up some more watery black paint and get your beautiful
pointy tip back, and we're just going to do
two strokes for the antenna. Just squeeze your
button, go for it. If they're a little bit
thinner or a little bit thicker than you
want, don't stress. Just accept it and love it. Now reload again with
some watery black paint, and we're going
to add some final texture lines to the wings. So just using the very, very, very thin tip of your
brush as best you can. Just have a few random black
lines through the wing and a few more closer to the body just to add a little
bit of a three D effect. Your final optional step, if you want to take it, will be to paint the edges
of your canvas. So literally any shade of
purple will work for this. So you can just mix all of the purples
that are currently on your plate and see
what colour you get. Or if you've got no purple left or you've done this over a couple of days and the purple on your
palette has dried, feel free to mix another purple. As I say, it can be literally
any shade of purple. So scrape the excess
purple off your brush and highly recommend you use
the Filbert brush for this because it's going to help you get a
straighter edge, and the bristles are
not going to splay and go onto your painting like they would
with a round brush. I just gonna speed this
bit up for you because it is a little bit of a
time consuming process, and you don't really need
to watch it, do you? And once you've done
that, congratulations. Your painting is complete. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you love your
finished piece. And if you don't
love your painting, I hope you at least
loved painting it and we'll come back
and do another one.
6. Your Project: Thank you for joining
me for this class, and I really hope you've
enjoyed the experience. Your next job is to take
the skills that you've learned and create
your own beautiful, unique piece of artwork. You can customize the colors of the background and
the butterfly, or you can even take
the skills that you've learned and do something
completely different. You can see here that I've used exactly the same techniques to paint a dragonfly
and some flowers. When you finish your painting, please do take a photo
of it and upload it to the gallery. I
can't wait to see it.
Sheree Lowe, Artist and instructor
