Butterfly specimen art

I have a piece of artwork underway for the girl's room.  It's way too complicated, and as a consequence is going no where fast.  I feel sad for her that the only things hanging on her wall are a group of five blank canvases (for the aforementioned artwork) and a clock.  So, rather than actually make progress on the first project, I've completed a quick fix in the last couple of days:

I'm the first to acknowledge that this is certainly not an original idea.  In fact, it wasn't an original idea when I made something similar for my niece about 5 years ago.  But I love it just the same.  It is also simple, and I thought I'd share my process with you, just in case you're inspired to do something similar.

Materials:
Butterfly print fabric
Iron on interfacing
Thick card for the background

Process:
I started out with some offcuts of the  'Illuminating Spring' (by Stephanie Marrot for Wilmington Prints)  butterfly fabric I used in this skirt (I have more left over, so they'll make another appearance at some point).  I then ironed some non-woven iron-on interfacing on the back.  I'd suggest using the stiffest that you have.  As my fabric was an odd size, I used a sheet of baking paper over it to stop the excess interfacing sticking to the iron or the ironing board.

I then cut out full butterflies (there were some on the fabric with their wings folded, and I didn't use these), and by sheer luck my offcuts yielded 37 butterflies.  I needed 36 for my project.  I used nail scissors for the cutting, as they allowed the precision I needed.  I wasn't too fussed if there was a small amount of background fabric left around each, and I also elected to cut off the antennae.

I then placed the butterflies in an arrangement that I was happy with, with the aim being to distribute the coloured ones throughout the frames.  The hard bit then was to work out what the spacing should be and how to line them up on the background.

Somewhere around about here I cut my thick card into squares the right size to fit inside my frames.  You need something with enough strength to take the weight of your butterflies without sagging over time.

I decided that I wanted to top of the wings to line up, rather than the bodies, and found that my quilting ruler was the best help for this.  Just be careful to learn from my mistake, and account for the width of any matt when placing the butterflies - I had to remove these three and start again, as I was too close to the top of my backing board!  Also, I found it easier to work upside down and to start with the bottom row, that way my ruler wasn't sitting on butterflies I'd already glued in place.

Now, fold your first butterfly in half, right sides together, so that your fold is along the body.  Then apply hot glue to the wrong side of the body (ie. the outside of the fold).  Press on to your background cardboard in the desired location, trying to keep the butterfly as folded as possible, but also making sure that the glue isn't attaching the two wings to each other.  You'll need to work pretty fast, as the glue cools and sets quite quickly.

Repeat for the rest of your butterflies.

When the glue has cooled and set you can squeeze the wings together a bit more if you like.  You can also pull off any glue threads that may be floating around.

Now you can frame them.  I used frames with double mounts, and the butterflies sat up from the backing cardboard enough to make a shadow, but the glass did flatten them more than I expected.  You could use a box frame if you wanted a more pronounced fold in the butterflies.

PS.  See that red butterfly in the middle?  It was really annoying me, as I attached it too low and the one below it too high.  I used a scalpel and carefully cut them off the background, then re-glued them in place.  Whilst you need to work quickly with the glue, mistakes can be rectified!

PPS.  My butterfly fabric has a cream background, but the fabric that I used for my niece had a black background, and the butterflies looked quite different from the fabric itself once they were cut out and mounted on off-white card.  Look at the colour of the butterflies, rather than the colour of the fabric when you're choosing a fabric for this project.

PPS.  There are more butterfly art & craft ideas in my 'artwork I could try myself' Pinterest board...

Oh, and the Girl is more than happy to have something to look at on her walls at last:

I finished something!

I'm feeling a bit 'stuck' craft-wise, so it was great to finish my Vogue artwork last night.  Here it is:

Hmm.  Slightly twisted on the page, but I can fix that up when I frame it.

I used two layers of tracing paper - the top layer has most of the drawing, plus a small amount of colour:

The layer underneath has most of the block colour, and some of the writing which I wanted to tone-down the colour of.

I used a mixture of ink (the black), coloured pencil and coloured card stuck down with double sided tape.

Inspired?  Want to make one?  It's really simple, so if you're planning to do something similar I'd recommend choosing a simple line drawing, and making a few copies of it at the size that you're after.

Your first step is to trace the line drawing - primary school stuff right?!  

And now some planning:

• If you're planning to use a texta for the line drawing, do a trial to make sure that it won't smudge! I had planned to use a marker for the red highlights, but found that the one I had on hand was going to smudge and switched to pencil instead. 

• You'll need to think about how you adhere the layers together.  I learnt from my son's Big Ben poster that double sided tape doesn't look that good stuck on the reverse side of tracing paper.  So, rather than stick the blocks of colour to the back of the first layer of tracing paper (which is what we did with the Big Ben poster), I stuck mine onto a second layer of tracing paper.  This way I could use my tape where it wouldn't be seen (I plan to join all of the layers together at the edges under a framing mat before hanging it on the wall).

• Check out what your planned colours look like underneath the tracing paper.  The red I used is a lot more orange than I originally intended, but it looks heaps better (and less orange) under the tracing paper than my first preference.  On a similar vein, I used a coloured tracing paper for the girls' blonde hair, but the adhesive 'Jac' paper I used to stick it down altered this to a solid colour, which was a bit disappointing at first.

• I used two layers of tracing paper, and would highly recommend it as opposed to attaching your coloured shapes to a solid background.  Using the second layer of tracing paper allows you to stick down your coloured card without having double-sided tape showing from the front, and allows you to line up all of the layers more easily than if you only have one layer above the solid background.

Your next step will be to cut the blocks of colour from coloured card/paper.  To do this accurately, place a copy of the picture over the top of your coloured card and then cut around the shape you're after (this is why you'll need a few copies of the picture).

I'd recommend cutting two layers of paper together where you have intersecting colours. For example, to do the socks and shoes I:

• Layered black/red and white card on top of each other, then put a copy of the picture over the top of the lot, 
• Cut the whole stack around the outline of the sock and shoes together (you have to be careful none of the layers move).  
• Removed the white/sock card, and cut the picture and the black/red card around the shoe outline. 

This way there is no gap between the sock and the shoe and there's no little bit of sock showing where the sock and shoe aren't cut exactly the same (hope that makes sense, I found it impossible to take photos while I was cutting!).  You might be able to see that I didn't use this approach for the intersection between the little girl's hair and the middle girl's dress, and there's a bit of a gap there.  Minor gaps are less visible once you put the line drawing over the top, but I know that if I think about it too much this bit of the picture will bug me!

I couldn't find any polka-dot paper, so I used
coloured pencil on the trace to make my own.

Finally, you can fill in some details with coloured pencil - I used pencil for the middle girl's shoes, the lighter sections on their toy (no idea what sort of animal it's supposed to be), the detailing on the smaller girls' dresses, the middle girl's headband, and the word 'pattern'.

Oh, and if you don't want to have to deal with it later, make sure that your drawing is square under the tracing paper before you begin!

Thanks for sticking with me all the way to the bottom!  If you do decide to make a tracing paper artwork I'd love to see how it turns out - leave me a comment with your link.

Vogue 2651 Wall Art

As I mentioned, I was inspired by the Schoolboy's Big Ben poster, and immediately pulled out one of my vintage Vogue patterns.  I enlarged the envelope illustration, and made a start.  It didn't take too long to work out that the texta that the Schoolboy used was way too thick for my purposes.  Fast forward a week, and after spending way too much time faffing around with my Rotring pens, I finally came to the conclusion that leaving them sit for 20 years and then expecting to resurrect them was asking a bit much!

I ended up using a 0.5mm 'Pentel for Film' marker that I thought I'd lost.  The actual drawing was quite quick, and here's my drawing after stage 1:

I'm finding it harder to find time to keep going than to actually do the construction, so here's where I'm up to now:

Here's a peek at how it looks underneath the top tracing paper layer.  The process's quite simple, but I plan to show you more of a 'how to' once I'm finished...

I'm off to sign up and check out the new 'creative spaces' over here and here.  I know, I know, if I did less of that I might be finished the picture by now, but I do love seeing what everyone else is up to!