Paper Butterflies for Mixed Media, Crafts, & Collage

1. Introduction: One of the most common components and arts and crafts are butterflies. They add a delicate touch of beauty as well as the feeling of spreading your wings and flying free. My name is Jennifer Laurel Keller. I'm an artist and instructor with over 20 years working in the arts. And I've been a fan of butterflies ever since I was a kid when I collected butterfly stickers and stuck them all over my bedroom walls. And I still love them today. Now everyone loves butterflies. But as artists, we also want to be unique and different. Definitely, we want to stand out from the rest. So in this class, paper butterflies, I share a leisurely project where we make our own butterflies from scratch using decorative papers. You can do this in preparation for larger works of mixed media art, collages or craft projects such as card making, junk journaling, or scrapbooking. In the lessons, I'll provide a quick color theory lesson for picking your palate. And talk about how to make more sophisticated butterflies shapes while keeping me inside playful and whimsical. I'll also talk about symmetry, contrast, composition, layering, and how to put them together with a strong adhesive so that they'll hold up even when used alongside wet media, such as paints in this class is right for you. If you love working with colorful papers and want to add a personal touch to your projects to make them more unique. Sorry, you ready to play. I'll see you in class. 2. Materials: Hello and welcome to the Materials lesson. So I do have a download for you. You can download the materials list PDF document which is attached to this class, and that'll have lots more details in it for you. So first off, we're going to want a sharp pair of scissors and you can do this with a glue stick. That's optional. And I recommend this if you don't have our other adhesive and just wanna do this real quick. And you don't intend on making these to go alongside a wet medium such as paint or ink. What I'm gonna be using in this class is the acrylic matte medium. This is a great product. I pour it out into this little squeeze bottle so that it's easier to use with a brush. And I use, I have a couple of small synthetic bristle brushes, depending on what size of paper I'm working on. You'll want a little bit of water to put your brushes in so they don't dry up. And a palette, I have a glass palette, but you can use anything that you have handy. And then I'm going to use a dish to corral all of my small paper cuttings for the butterfly. So that helps. I have a paint rag and I use a little bit of scrap paper for making our templates for the butterflies, as well as using as a slip sheet for glowing. And then I have a Sharpie and a white pen, and I have my decorative papers. You can have a mix of solid and pattern papers. And in the class I do a few different color palettes. I do reading green color palette with a few neutrals. I also have some neutral grains and black and white and silver here. For a neutral butterfly. Here I have a variety of purple and yellow and cream papers. And I do another butterfly that is blue and orange and has a few neutrals in it as well. So any papers that you can come up with all get into color palettes later. And you can do this however you like and been the rules however you see fit. So up next we're gonna do that quick color theory lesson, and I'll see you there. 3. Quick Color Theory: Hello and welcome to the quick color theory lesson. So here I have a color wheel that I made for another class, which is called color quests, where we mix paints and we're not gonna get into all of that. But I did want to go through just a few little things. Now, you'll notice some of the colors on this color will are kind of dark. That's how they come out of the tube. But I do have another chart here, and this is when all of these colors are mixed with white. So read turns pink when we add white to it. So any variation of red would be pinks and things like that. Orange turns kind of into a peachy color. Yellow with a little bit of white. A dark green or a light green will be fine for the color palette. So when I refer to these colors, here's the purple. We've got lavender and different purples and Violet's. So when we have a color on the color wheel, it has an opposite color. And that is what's across the color wheel. So blue and orange are opposites, or in other words, complimentary colors. And so any range of blues or orange will work for this color palette. It's lovely to have a blue butterfly, but if you add just a touch of orange, or in my case I have kind of a rusty orange and then a copper as well as neutrals. It's going to give the blue paper a little bit more pop because they work together so nicely. The next color palette that I will discuss is purple and yellow. So I have this really dark purple on the color wheel and across from it is yellow. And any variation of the two will work. Anything that has purple tones in it and yellow tones in it. So that's the base for that color palette. Red and green are also opposites on the color wheel. So you can work with pinks or dark greens or light grains. Anything in those families will do. And so here I have the base of green and red. And you can see those are really pretty textured papers there. But I also had some neutrals. I've got my sheet music and some kind of brownish grays and creams and things like that. And then some floor roles which have both in it. So it's okay to stray a little bit and introduce a small amount of other colors, but for the most part, it's red and green. Okay, next I have the neutral color palette. So I have black and some grays, some whites and creams. And I also have a silver, so those are very neutral. And this will be good for talking about contrast and not having to work in worrying about color. So that's everything. Just wanted to keep it really simple. Up next, we are going to do our butterfly cutouts. So we're going to talk about the shapes of the butterflies and how to make our templates. So I will see you there. 4. Butterfly Shapes: Hello and welcome to the butterfly shapes lesson. So in this lesson you can see that we make for different butterfly shapes. This is going to keep your butterflies looking somewhat realistic, even though we're going to make them really fun and playful in the center with our different layers of paper. So what I'm gonna do is simply Google butterflies. And then I'm going to hit images. And this is gonna give me lots of pictures of butterflies. So I'm just going to find a few that I like. And then we'll use them as a reference for drawing. So here's one. And this is more of a monarch shape. And then I have this one really pretty very different shape, but it's still very much butterfly, this one. And then I have this guy which is kind of a moss shape. So these are two that I made before and just does a reference. These are about four inches across. And you can make these smaller or larger depending on what you're working on. So I'm just taking a piece of scrap paper. It's 8.5 by 11 and I'm going to cut it in half to have the right size to do our template. And then I'm going to fold it in half again so that when we cut through, it's going to be two sides of the butterflies. So we're only going to draw one side of the butterfly on the face of this. And I'm going to start with where the top of the wing comes out. And then I go straight across because you'll see the wings come out in the center, kind of straight out. And then I'm doing the angled down for the inside of the wing, starting at the top. And I'm going to curve in and curve down. And I'm going to come in a little bit on that line, curve around and meet my line from before. And then I'm gonna pop in the head of the butterfly and the tail. And it comes about halfway down that wing. So there is the first shape and then we're going to cut it out. So I'm just going to follow along my guideline with my scissors, pivot that paper with the scissors on the template. And then as I occur around, I'm going, I'm cutting really slowly and turning the paper. And then you can kind of curve around in, smooth out any rough lines from the sketch. Alright, curving down and it doesn't have to be perfect if you don't cut exactly like the first drawing, that's fine because nobody's going to be checking this in comparison to the reference image. And then I just cut into that little notebook there and pop that little triangle out. And then when I open it up by having two wings and I have a nice symmetrical Butterfly and I did a pretty good job on that one. It's a lot more realistic than this one that I did previously. Or I just kinda wing debt. Get it when debt. So let's move on. Okay, here we have another one. This one, the angle of the wings are a lot more dramatic. They go up a lot more from the head. So I'm just using this one as a reference to make sure I don't go too far because the first one was a little bit big for what I want it for. So I made a fold to kinda keep me in line. Ok, so I marked where the head's going to go and then way up. So check your angles. And then I wiggled down and then come in kind of at a straight line there, little bit of a angle. But then I come in a little bit about a third of the way in. And then I'm doing a couple of guide dots so that I have something to aim for. So that's where that curved line is going to end up. And then I'm gonna do a wiggle line down to about here. And there. I go down the edge and meet that line. And then I'm just going to draw this wiggly line and it goes a little bit below and then up to meet that line. And I'll have these as a download as well so that you can see the outlines of my shapes. And then I'm just going to cut these out, wiggling the paper back and forth. Again, you can go in or outside of the lines. Nobody's going to be checking you to make sure that you do this exactly perfect. You just want a butterfly shape that's a little bit different than the one before so that you have some variation and your butterflies. Alright, so there is my template and it's pretty close. Looks good. And moving on, I'm going to fold my paper. And let's mark where the head is going to be about halfway down the fold. And then just checking my angles the way they come out from the center. Going to go up and goes in a little bit. And Back in. Then I'm going to come in, start my wing there. And the bottom LNG and the top wing are about the same height. They're about the same measurement up and down. So I'm going to just kinda mark that with my finger, curve around and then come back up a little bit below, right there. So then I'll add the body. It doesn't come down quite as far as the wing and will cut that out. Alright, just curving along. You can go straight up because the two sections of weighing kind of followed the same outer line. There's just this little triangle where they meet. So that might be helpful. And then coming around and getting that little knock out. And then there is my butterfly. Wings are a little bit shorter than in the picture, but that's totally fine. No big deal. Let's do this one. So on this one, the head is the highest point on the moth butterfly. So I'm going to mark where the head starts. And then I'm going to just kind of eyeball my proportions there. And there's a little bit of a curve upwards and then back down to the end of the wings. So I'm just gonna make a little curve and then do a rough outline. And there's a little bit of a wiggle on the outline of the ends of the wings, but that's okay. Hearing going to define the body a little bit more because it's all within the wing. The tail doesn't come below the wings. You'll see the wings are lower. So I'm just going to do the first one and then I can add a little wiggle line there. And then this wing is starts on the outside at the end and comes to about there on the bottom. So I'm just gonna do a curved line to the fold. And that's it. I leave out the antenna. Cuz it's such a narrow thing to cut. You can always add it back in with paint or another piece of paper. Just cut a little strip of paper. But for the most part, I typically just omit the antenna and nobody seems to care or notice. Okay, so there's my outline, it looks pretty good. And I'm ready to rock and roll for the individual butterflies. Here's all four, you can see I've got a lot of variation in size and shape. And those look really good. So I will see you in the next lesson where we start on the neutral butterfly. 5. Neutral Butterfly: Hello and welcome to the neutral butterfly lessons. So in this lesson you can see we get all the way to the end of this neutral Butterfly by layering lots of pieces of paper. But notice they're pretty simple shapes. And then I add a bit of pen work at the end. So let's have a look. Okay, so I have all of my papers for my neutral butterfly. And I'm going to set all of them to the side except for my template and this dark piece of paper. I'm going to set the dish off to the other side because I'm right handed, so I want more elbow room on my right hand. And I'm going to cut out a rectangle of paper that will exceed the size of my template. And then I'm going to fold it in half. And this is a card stock weight paper, so it's a little bit thick. And I'm choosing a darker paper because I typically work over lighter backgrounds and I want a lot of contrast. So I've just sandwiched this piece of paper into my template. I'm holding it really firmly in place so that it's nice and snug. I'm just going to follow it around. And I can snip off the pieces of paper as I go around sharp turns so that I'm not fighting the paper as I turn it. And I'm just going to continue through till it's cutaway. And I'm just taking my time holding the paper firmly so that my butterfly doesn't slip. And that is that. All right, so let's open that up and see how I did. And we have a nice shape for my base and all of the other papers that are gonna be glued down to this. So there we go. And the next layer I'm gonna do another butterfly shape on this sheet music. But it doesn't have to be as big because I'm going to cut it down so that I reveal a margin of the base butterfly that's darker. So I'm gonna do the same thing. Put the template down, and instead of cut around it, I'm gonna cut on the inside of it. And you can see it doesn't go all the way to the end of my template, but my cuts will meet right where it fits. So I'm just going around and leaving about an eighth of an inch to a quarter of an inch revealed. I don't have to do all of those wiggly details. I can just make it a straight, curved line. And then I pop it on over the top and it's a nice complement to the base. Okay, now I'm going to do a shaped for the body and I'm gonna do a simple leaf shape cut that's kind of thin. And this will be for the body and it's going to cover up the fold on those first two pieces of paper. And now I'm going to cut a strip. It's about a half inch wide, maybe three-quarters. And then I'm going to fold it in half. And But a tear shape out of that. And this is going to fit inside of the wing, but I'm just going to round the end out really simply. And then just tear those apart from each other and decide which part of the wing I want to set it down in. And this is a nice dark medium gray, so there's gonna be a lot of contrast. And here is an interesting print on this paper. So I'm going to fold it and then do another tear shape. And then I can snip those apart and decide where it wants to live. It's a little fat. I want to leave that sheet music exposed, so I just trimmed it down a little bit. But you can see there's not a lot of contrast on this paper. It's pretty light. It's a light grey with the white over the top. So it comes out looking pretty light. And it's kind of getting lost in that sheet music. So I might want to layer it with something else. And the more we layer, the more fun this is going to be. So I'm trying it there. And then I decided maybe I can put it over the top of those grade darker gray pieces of paper and just offset them a little bit. And then they show up a lot more. Ok, here's the same print but on a black paper. And I'm going to fold that in half so that I get two out of it. And on this one I think I'm only going to make it the cut on one side, so I just have stripes on it and I'm just holding it up to the butterfly, seeing how big it needs to be, and then pop them down below. So those are looking really Q so far. I have lots of contrast, everything sticking out. But let's take it further. I have this white paper that has a really fun texture on it. And I'm gonna do a small tear shape out of that. And just keep going down in size or wherever you need it to go, make it fun size for that area. And I can layer again to get more contrast and interests. So that looks good. And I like the lines in this paper. So I think I'm gonna do a little piece to go over the body. Really small. Ok? And now I'm thinking, because this paper's black on the other side. So I'm going to cut two circles out. I folded the paper, are gonna cut a circle out. Or if you have a hole punch, you could use that as well. And I'm going to bridge the gap between those just overlap both of them. And then it gives it a fun new element. And you see that a lot with butterflies, they have a lot of dots on them. Okay, now I am cutting out the sheet music ticket, that symbol, kinda where the head's going to go. So added when z there. And that's looking really good. I think I'll do one more. So I just want a little bit more emphasis on the bottom. So I'm gonna do one more cut and then slip that in underneath. And now because it is kind of closer to the sheet music, it's a more subtle, it's just a little added repetition with that gray. It's just a hint of it down below because it's up above. Okay, I have this kind of Peter silver paper. So I'm gonna cut that and fold it in half. I'm gonna do a circle. Just really, you know, not, not that big, Just a small cut turning the paper. Or you can punch that out. And I think all layer that that way. So you can arrange this however you see fit what the papers that you have. And so I arrange everything on the plate to corral it so that I can remember kind of where it goes and go back for it and they won't get lost. So I poured out some acrylic medium onto my palette and I'm choosing my medium small brush, not my smallest brush. Because I'm going to glue down the larger piece first. And on my slip sheet, I'm just dabbing my brush into the acrylic medium and then painting it on the side of this paper that I don't want to show. And then you want to apply not too much and not too little. And you'll get a feel for it as you go. Just going to pop that on, lining up the folds and then smoothing it out. And there is just a moment of time where you can scooted around and get the margins just how you want them and it doesn't have to be perfect. And then with my smaller brush, I'm gonna pop my bigger brush into the water so that it doesn't get dried up. I'm gonna paint the acrylic medium onto the back of my smaller papers. Or you can paint them on to the butterfly if that's more comfortable. I do both in this class. Just kind of depending on the paper and the mood I'm in. So it does just take some practice. Ok. And then just eyeballing where I want to put it on this side and now it's symmetrical. Okay, let's do this one now. And I will allow myself to change my mind a little bit at the glue down phase, because sometimes you get, you get these pieces back out new, come up with new ideas about how to arrange them. And it's okay. To change your mind a little bit. Alright, and you can smooth it over the top with your acrylic medium. If you apply it down to the butterfly, just add enough so that it will exceed the edges and you get a nice glue down and then smooth out the rest pickup backup with the brush and you're ready for your next piece. Okay. So this one's going under. So I have to put it down first. And then I always pick it back up with the brush if it'll let me scooting that into place. And then I'm gonna put the body over the top one. Were they all meet? So if there's some imperfections about how things line up, it'll cover that. And you can see it kind of makes the sheet music a little bit darker. Well, it's wet but it does dry up. It doesn't do that with all papers. But with this particular sheet music, it does dry up and you can't see that anymore. And those are done. Let's put the body down. So I have my first layer smoothing out the acrylic medium. And then my second layer. That looks good. And then the head. And then pushing that down and then lightly coming over the top and cleaning up the acrylic medium. Now I'm going to put down my dots. And I think I have this in a slightly different order. That looks really cute with the computer. And I'm gonna come back over with the black dot. And it gives it that look that butterflies have naturally where they, it's like a protection where it makes it look like there's eyes on their wings. Now I have my black and white pen. And first I'm going to come around with my sharpie and just do a few dots inside wherever there's space where you can kinda come around with a few dots in a row and fill in some of that space. You see a lot of dots on butterflies in nature, especially at the ends of the wings. So I'll just come through and do a few dots. And then on the darker papers, I can do some white dots. And you could also do this with acrylic paint and a small brush. You could do White Out and coming through with a wiggly line there. You can use a paint pen if the end was small enough. And there we go. I think yeah. I think I try here to do some dots in the middle of those black dots, but they were still slightly wet from the acrylic medium. So I'm going to have to come back over these later. Right now it's just gumming up my pen, so I'm going to wait. But there we have it. That's my neutral Butterfly. And I think it's super cute. So up next, we're going to work on the purple and the yellow butterfly. So I'll see you there. 6. Purple and Yellow Butterfly: Hello and welcome to the purple and yellow butterfly lesson. So in this lesson, we're going to make this sweet guy. And let's get into it. So I have my base paper, the black and purple paper. And I'm holding my template up and cutting around and then folding it in half, popping the template over the side and then cutting it out. And this is bed up. You've seen the process once, but I wanted you to definitely get all of the goodies on these other three butterflies. So just cutting around, opening it up, getting it. I'm kind of smoothed out and I'm ready to pick a second paper. So I'm deciding, do I wanna do the sheet music? Or do I want to use this floral paper which has purple and there is a little bit of green on this and the green doesn't clash, so I'm totally fine with it. I have that sheet of paper. So I'm just holding them up to see how I want to do it. And I think I'm gonna go with this one. So I'm going to cut a size that will fit for my next layer, but this one had some tape on it so I didn't want to use it. So I just held it up. And luckily I had plenty of this and I'm going to fold it in half. Put the template over it, and then cut on the inside. And I'm cutting about a quarter of an inch of the edge off so that when I come over the top, there will be a reveal on my first base paper. And then I think I wanna do one more layer because this is a big butterfly. So I know that I don't need this paper to be quite as big because I'm going to trim it down on my template. So I'm just popping the same template over that and cutting in again so that I get all of the paper inside my cuts. Trimming that off, opening up. And the cut was a little wonky where the wings meet on the side. So what I'm gonna do is just trim that up a little bit more so that I can just kinda piece it together. And it worked out really well. So I just cut the bottom and top away from each other. And that's going to work great. Okay, now let's work with this purple paper. So I haven't folded and I'm going to do a teardrop shape. And that'll look really cute next to that, light, buttery yellow. And then I figured out that on the other side, it's a lighter purple. So the two base colors were kind of dark, so I thought I would lighten it up. And that looks really good. And I'm offsetting these, just playing around with the placement. And I just kind of wiggle it around. Does and that seemed kind of droopy in a way. So maybe I want to scoop them out to the ends. I don't know, I'm just kinda playing around. And I think I'm going to do something similar to what I had at first that yeah, let's let's bring him out. Kind of how I had it originally. Ok, so now I'm going to cut the body shape out. And that's just like a leaf shape with two points on the ends. And now I'm going to do a series of circles with this yellow paper, just curling that paper around. And I can add those, some of those darker areas that need just a pop of light worms. And that looks really cute. Okay, here is that white paper again. And I'm playing with kind of this wiggly roughly edging that I could put under one of the layers and just kinda have it peaking out. So this is an option if you like it, it's a little bit long so I could put it behind the whole thing. You can glue to the back and just have it peeking out from the back. But I'm going to trim it down. And maybe I can get it in between the black and purple floral paper, which would be really cute. Okay, so non just going to hold it up and do that again. And it's kind of just like a curvy line. And you could play around with whatever shape you might just kind of like a roughly strip. Ok, and now I have the purple paper again. I'm gonna do some circles, sorry, it's a little bit off screen. But remember this purple paper had a dark side and in the light side. So I'm going to use the darker side for some circles. And then I was thinking maybe I could cut out some of the flower shapes and have those as a little element kind of peeking out from the body and layering that way, but it got a little busy. So I'm just going to trim that down and make a bigger circle. And that'll work. Okay, so I'm gonna take everything over to my dish and do the glue down. So I have my slip sheet of scrap paper, I have my brush and my acrylic medium and I'm gluing the back of that floral paper for my second layer. And I'm just gonna center that as well as I can and smooth it out. Very cute. And now come over the top with some warmed with the yellow and some contrast. So that I am lightening up this dark background. Getting that nicely glued down. All of them are meeting in the middle. Holding it up to eyeball at first, then gluing and then popping it down. So there are my three layers of the main shape of the butterfly. Now let's do some of our tear drop shapes. So I've got my lighter side of the purple paper. And of course your paper is going to be way different than mine. This is simply here as a inspiration for you to work on your paper's width here or the larger floral circles. So I'll get those down. And I went to quickly and forgot my little wiggle ease. And I decided to just leave them out. Maybe I'll use them later. Here's the body. And now I'm going to glue down my circles. And with this butterfly and going to save the pen work for the end. There's a lesson at the very end of the class where I only work on the finishing touches. So that, that's when I've decided to finish up the pen work because I want all of this acrylic medium to dry first. Because remember I ran into that with the neutral butterfly where it was preventing me from using the white pens. So I'm gonna save that for later. So I'm just getting my circles down wherever they want to live and just making those final decisions. Maybe I want to add this little white one. I think that got left off of the previous butterfly. And there's my finished piece. It's all, well, it's almost done except for the pen work. So I'm going to let this dry and move on. So up next, we're going to work on the red and green Butterfly. And I will see you there. 7. Green and Red Butterfly: Hello and welcome to the red and green butterfly lesson. So I've got my back paper. I'm gonna go with this darker floral paper and cut out that rectangle big enough for my template to fit on and fold it in half. So you'll probably recognize these steps by now and you can start to think ahead. So here I'm just trimming around and you can snip off at any point what the access if it's getting in your way. Opening that up and look at the back is really pretty too, but I'm going to use that site. Okay, and then the next one, I'm gonna do my sheet music. So going around that, folding it in half, putting the template over. And what are we gonna do? We are going to hold it tight and trim inside the template. Cutting away about a quarter inch. And then look how cute that is. It came apart in the center, but that's okay. I'll just glue it down. And then let's go with this green, this more olive green. So I'm folding in half, cutting out my tears Shapes. I'm going to only do two of the layers of butterfly wings and then go straight into the T-shapes. So folding in half again, just cutting out this little strip and doing a thinner TO shape there and putting it on top. Looks good. Now let's work with the red. So I'm just cutting us small strip off, doing a tear shape and Reza pretty strong colors. So I'm just kind of deciding, do I wanna put it behind the green or in front of it? And I think I'm gonna put it behind, so I just backed it out a little bit so that there are offset. And then I can do the body shape with this gray, this neutral gray. Really cute so far. So more red, I think. Let's do a wider to your shape. And then I can put it down lower and just kind of offset those a little bit to fill in that general area. I like that can even touch the back paper. Okay. And then I'm thinking, what if I cut out some of these flower shapes and worked those in? Not everything has to be a solid or a smooth line. I can do some leafy things and some floral things. So that looks super cute and it's hinting at the back paper as well. So I'm repeating those elements, which is always kind of a nice way to design. So I'm going to put those closer to the center and then cut out a similar shape. Balance it. And you don't have to make things perfectly symmetrical. It's okay to have the human touch. You want this to seem handmade. So there we have the other one. And then I have this wiggly piece from before and maybe I can work that in. So I'm going to take everything off, just scooted to the side and start in with my sheet music. So let's bring over the acrylic medium and my slip page. Getting that glued up, centering it and smoothing it out. And I love putting a lighter paper over the darker paper for that contrast on the margin. Remember, you can have things have harsh contrast or subtle contrast to make it more soft. Okay, now we've got the red going on because red is a really strong color, so you want it to be overlapped. And now we can start in on the green. So I'm gonna do this side first just to kind of have one side done so I don't forget anything on the second side. I can just, you know, you can do color color on both sides or you can do one side all at once and then do the other side next. So I'm gonna put on the body. And then Mayflower, I'm gonna use a little bit more of the medium with that flower so that all those little intricate cuts get glued down and start on this side, replicating what I did on the first side. Q. Now the red. And you can use your brush to place things because it'll just pick it up, those small pieces of paper. It'll just become right up off of your surface. Now the green getting that down and the flower. So I think that is just adorable. I think this is my favorite one. So there it is. I'm going to let it dry and then we'll work on the pen later. So up next, we're going to work on the blue and orange butterfly. So I will see you there. 8. Blue and Orange Butterfly: Hello and welcome back to the blue and orange butterfly. And as you can see, this one is a little bit smaller and I'm doing more of a close up here, but it's really sweet darling. And let's have a look at how we do this. So I'm going to scoot all of those papers aside and use this one as my background. And I think that's a really sweet paper. So just cutting a rectangle around the butterfly. And what are we gonna do next? We're going to fold it in half. Great. And now we're gonna put the template over that and hold it tight. This one's slips around a little bit, but just take it slow. All right. This is a smaller piece, so I'm just going slower. This is sped up because you've seen this before. But at any point that you need to just trim away that excess, go ahead and do that. Unless you're trying to get an outline of a butterfly, that's something you might wanna do. And use it for negative space around a butterfly. Ok, I loved the background or the back of that one. Trim up that end on the tail. And we have a sweet little blue butterfly. Ok, so next, I'm going to do the sheet music. Thinking about where I want to line up my butterfly and then cut around it. And what are we going to do next? Fold it in half and pop that on. And we're going to try and inside the wings going all the way getting those nice brown to edges. I can be a little bit more simple on this pass. And open it up and look how cute that. I mean, we could say this is done, honestly, that is adorable. Let's work in some orange. See how that just seemed to pop when I put it over the orange because blue and orange really sad each other off. So I'm just picking a paper for my next cut. So let's do this one and it has some gold in a, which is kinda fun. So folding it in half, cutting out my tear shape. And then popping that in just how we did before. Playing with color and our color palette. Let's do an orange. This is a really rusty orange. It's really going to set off the gold that's in that other blue paper. But look how it just makes that blue pops. I'm holding that down and popping the blue under it. And now they really, really and just pop against each other. Okay, this paper has two sides, ones Teale one is a little bit darker, more of a turquoise. So I'm going to make another tear Shape. I've got a little bit of contrast and variation, and that is so sweet. I love it. And I like that blue and gold paper so much. I'm gonna do another one with that. Fold it in half. And you can just kind of ible how big it needs to be to go in and you can always come back and trim it up. Slide that under I think. And super cute. Right? This one came together really quickly. What I wanna do some circles. So let's do, or actually let's do the body. Get down. And this is a kind of metallic copper paper. So I'm gonna do a strip. And then I'll fold it just a little bit because I want to coppers circles loop. And there we go. So now it's ready to go into the dish. So I don't lose any of those small pieces which I have done. And that's why we have the dish. I love that paper. Okay, I've got misled sheet. Let's do our sheet music. Okay, deciding which side I wanna get down. I like how you can see the copyright year of the sheet music on the left side. So I definitely want that to show. And then I can just pick it up with a wet brush and glue it down. So cute. Oh my gosh, I love it. I just, I don't know this one is just darling. Okay. Okay. And get that nicely smoothed out. Adorable. So we wanted the orange behind the blue. Orange is really loud. Unless you're a big fan of orange. I, I tend to just use it as an accent color to allow the blue to pop. So I'm going to have it down first so that the blue covers it up. Very cute. Okay, just following through and getting everything into place. Okay, let's put the next blew down because the teal was going over the top of those two kind of in the middle. And that'll kind of separate those a little bit. We're going to get those down first and then overlap over the top in the middle. And just give a variation of blue there, which I think is really sweet. Alright, just kinda smooth that out. And then we're gonna do the body. Okay, so repeating that, rusty orange. Very nice. I think I've flipped it over, so it's slightly different, but it's still pretty orange, kinda brown. And then I have my copper there. And that is not very contrasted, is it? It's more of the same value as the blue underneath it. So when we get to the Penn section, I'm going to kinda separate that a little bit with some ink. Okay, so there it is. What, a little sweet enough. So I will see you in the next lesson where we do our final touches. Let's get to it. 9. Finishing Touches: Okay, we're back to do the finishing touches. And you can see that this lesson really rounds out the look and finishes these off. I love them so much. So let's see. Okay, so I did the pen work on the first one, as you remember. And I'm going to grab my white pen now and continue that with the other butterflies. So I'm going to go around and it took a little while to get the ink to flow because I had tried to do it over the what acrylic medium. And it kind of summed up the tip of my pen. So now it just took a couple passes and now it's flowing nicely. And I'm gonna just do these dots around the ends of the wings. Just like a nature. We see this a lot going around the edges, real sweet. And these little details are going to make it seem more finished. And also at the end of a project I really do every time like to make sure that I have dark and light coming through so that it has a balanced scale of light and dark. And adjust rounds out the project so much. A lot of new artists and crafters want to kind of hug that middle zone of value. And in the art world, value means how light or dark something is. So it helps to just pop in a little bit of a bright white or a dark dark if you don't have that yet. Of course I use some dark papers as my base. But if you tend to work on really dark backgrounds, you might wanna do a lighter base paper. So here I have a few little circles going as well as dots. But you could do this however you want. You could do dashes, you could do zigzags, you could do any kind of mark making that you prefer. And then I'm gonna do some circles inside of the color shapes. And that looks really, really cute. So now let's work on our blue and orange butterfly. This little guy. So I'm gonna do some circles in those Drucker copper areas because I want those to stand out. And so I'm gonna do a line around the edge as well. Just kinda draw a circle around that. And doesn't have to be perfect, but it does help make those standout. And I, I do have the flower components around the edges to from that blue paper. But I'm just gonna go in between with a few dots. And it is possible to get carried away. But if you're having fun, then that's fine of K. And so I thought I could also add just a few more decorative components here. I like how this paper is lighter, so it's also going to add some contrast. So I'm going to use this over the body of my blue and orange butterfly. And so I just cut around that. And it's not even in the same shape as the cutout from before, but I'm not going to worry about it too much. Here. I'm gonna do a little circle around that symbol. I used to be, I used to know what all of these symbols were called. I, I should brush up on that. Alright, and now I think I'll cut these out. Really simple. Kind of small, if you have arthritis or any kind of trouble doing these small, small details, I really recommend a hole punch for those little circles. Okay, just popping those Dan with my small brush, grabbing it and then smoothing it out. And then the center. And this is just adding a little bit more light to those areas. And I love how the brushes Chi picks it up. Helps save my fingers from getting more sticky. So that one seems good. Let's work on this one. It seems a little bit kinda stuck in the middle spectrum, kind of what these medium tones. So I'm gonna do a couple of these guys. Where are the symbols called? I have to Google it. I used to know a signature. I don't know. I can't remember. Ok. Do you do smoothened out? And again, Everything's in 2s because we're working symmetrically. And that looks good. Alright, so I'm back with my sharpie pen. I'm gonna do some black circles. 123123 dot, dot. And let's do some down here as well. So now it's got a lot going on. Just jazz delta k dot-dot-dot. It didn't seem like there was a lot of extra room, but I ended up fitting a lot of Sharpie dots in this little butterflies, Doo-doo-doo-doo. And looks great. Ok, now the green and red, that one seems pretty much done dummy, so I'm going to skip it. And this one we already did. So that is finished. So here we are. We're done. I love them so, so much. I think they're adorable and how cute for making my artwork more personal and unique. And I just love him. I hope you enjoyed this. Actually, I decided to do two more circles right there. Okay, now we're done. Thank you so much for joining me for this class. I thoroughly enjoyed making these paper butterflies with you. If you would like to share your project or would like some feedback, I encourage you to post a picture in the project gallery and let me know about your experience. Also. If you have any questions, I hope you'll ask me in the discussion section. I check skill share a lot and would love to interact with you. And you might help another student who was wondering the same thing. If you enjoyed this class, please consider following me for future updates on new classes that I offer. I also have several other painting and mixed media classes which are ready and waiting for you to explore. On my teacher profile page. And remember, arts and crafts are meant to be fun. So if you show up in practice with an open mind, you'll learn something new every time. Happy creating much love.