How to Watercolor Butterfly - easy beginner butterfly painting

Hello and welcome back to the blush studio. Another day, another butterfly. You know how I am. So today we're going to do another, it's mostly black and white butterfly, but there's some other different color elements to it. Unlike what I would normally suggest now, I actually started with the black and kind of worked from darkest to lightest. So that's kind of interesting just different ways that my style and my technique has changed and evolved over time. But a lot of it is still the same. So I did apply some masking fluid. There we go. Got a little brain freeze there. Some masking fluid to the spots just like I do for all of my butterfly tutorials. And if you need kind of some masking fluid tips, I do have a video on that that I'll link down below. But in general, I'm just kind of applying the exterior color. And I like to start with the outside and work my way in for butterflies, which is actually the opposite of what I like to do for my flowers. Just because usually there's more detail and more things to follow and kind of map out on the exterior of the wings. And then as it goes towards the interior, it's a little more simple. And by starting with the outside, I can kind of establish those details and just kind of bring everything together a little bit more slowly. Now the color that I'm using is my favorite black tone. It's Hematite Genuine by Daniel Smith. It's just kind of a warm black and it has a nice even application, which is really what I'm going for when I'm looking at my watercolor pigments. That doesn't mean to say that you need to have this black in order to get a good color. I often will also add like a little bit of yellow to it or a little bit of yellow ochre just to kind of warm it up a little bit more. But that's just kind of a personal preference thing. So right now I'm just slowly applying that in, kind of getting the larger sections filled in. So it's pretty mindless, if you will, like it's hard to mess this up. And one of the big things that I'm trying to do is make sure that it has a nice even coat of pigment across the whole section of the wing because it would look really funny if it was patchy at this point. You can see I'm like really fine tuning things. I am working with a watercolor brush right now. I believe it's my round number six and I'll have that linked down below as well. Just really getting the color in there. See how I'm tapping that back in just to make sure it's nice and even. And then kind of once I have the exterior mapped out I can start to work on the details that are in the interior. And a lot of times those details, especially like the veins, if you will, of the wings, will connect to exterior elements. So just like that little section there that I just connected. So for me it's easier to kind of work from the outside and then just connect those sections once I've like established where the certain shapes are to the elements that are on the interior. Because usually the interior is a little more simple where the exterior is the part that's more complicated. Now it looks like I forgot to add some masking fluid so I'm taking a different brush. I've protected the brush using just kind of a quick trick and I'm applying a little bit more masking fluid to areas that I want to keep that white section. So this way when I'm applying the watercolor I can apply it without fuss and later pull up the masking fluid to reveal the white paper underneath. You can also do this if you want to like apply a wash of color and then apply the masking fluid. When you remove the masking fluid it will mimic, it will then just take on the color that was first applied down. That was like a really long way to say if you were to apply color to the paper first and then put masking fluid down then you would see the color that you applied. So you can see that I'm avoiding that area where I put the masking fluid down and that's just to give it a chance to dry. Masking fluid is notorious for destroying brushes unless you're using kind of a protective element so I definitely do not want this brush to be ruined. So I'm going to be a little bit more careful. This is my watercolor brush which I definitely don't think that you have to invest in crazy expensive brushes in order to have a good painting. Don't let anybody tell you that. A good quality brush doesn't have to be expensive but you don't have to go crazy with it. So I'm testing to see if the masking fluid is dry and it's not yet. So I'm going to keep working on these other details until I can go back and fill that in. So the parts that I'm going over but are still coming up white that's where the masking fluid already is. The difference between a regular brush if you will like a standard brush and a watercolor brush is that a watercolor brush is much softer and it usually holds more pigment and more water. Really that's kind of the main purpose of getting a brush that is specifically for watercolor as opposed to a brush that is just for like acrylic or for oils because it's just a different painting medium and a different technique that's used. So the nice thing about a watercolor brush is that you don't have to like go back and forth as often and it's really easy to apply a thick wash of color or a thick light layer of watercolor which is what I did on the blue butterfly that's on top of this one. So there are different reasons to have them. If you are a beginner I actually recommend starting with more of like the all-purpose brushes rather than specifically a watercolor brush because that way you have a little bit more control. The water in the brush can be really overwhelming and so I actually recommend getting familiar with watercolor and like kind of how wet you want your paper to be or your brush to be before you start investing in a watercolor brush. Now right now you can see I'm taking a brush that is just a little bit wet and I'm taking some of the pigment and I'm loosening it around the edges. I'm just softening the edges of the details like of the black section in order to kind of pull it out and create the veins that you see within the butterfly wing. Now this is what I did a year ago. If I were to do it over again I definitely wouldn't do it this way. Not only is it not great for the brush and the paper to just like massage it like this, there's nothing wrong with it but there are easier ways to do this. What I would do now is I would take a brush that is mostly dry so just barely damp and add a little bit of pigment to it and kind of add it like another layer. One thing that I struggle with is that I always want all of my transitions to be super smooth but something that I'm learning as I'm just continuing to grow in my watercolor abilities is that some of the beauty is having that transition visible and so now if I were to paint this I definitely wouldn't be doing that massaging motion that I was just doing and you'll see me do again right there just where I'm kind of wiggling it back and forth. Again not a bad thing but I'd rather not do that on dry paint. It just kind of, yeah, it messes with the texture of the paper. It's really not great for your brush and this is a more high quality brush and so I do want to keep it nicer but it's just not the way that I would practice now I guess. So I'm continuing to learn. This was a year ago from the time that I'm filming this. I'm continuing to learn and continue to grow in my own artistic ability which I hope that you will continue to do as well and I guess it's fun to see in hindsight how I would change. Now something like this where I'm going in with a pretty wet brush and I'm kind of picking up some of the pigment, that doesn't bother me as much as just the like massaging and kind of creating a texture. Now if you're going for a texture like that I would probably, I would now if I wanted to create that texture on my painting which sometimes I do for architecture, I would do it with one of my all-purpose brushes and not my nice watercolor brush but I mean you can see where I did that. See how that softens everything if you look at and if the wing that's now on top compared to the wing that is on the bottom it's so much softer and so much more graceful. So that does work and I'm not saying that if you do that you're a bad artist or or you know that you shouldn't do that but I am saying that now that I've had more practice and experience I would do it differently. Since I have a little bit of that pigment on my brush now from kind of massaging or aggravating the paint that's down there you can then pull it up on the veins and that's just like a really pretty way to really a simple way to kind of create that really soft line. It even has like a little bit of a gradient because as the pigment fades going up the vein it'll be more concentrated at the base of the color and it just gets softer as it goes up which I do really like that effect. I like to have a or just like something that's a little bit more intentional for all of my lines like this. So if you've seen my other watercolor butterfly videos then you'll know that one thing that I love doing is either making the line darker close to the butterfly or towards the tips just to kind of add a little bit of depth and dimension. It makes it a little bit more interesting and it also just allows your eye to travel a little bit more and it creates an unexpected I've gone in with a little bit of pigment and I'm just kind of popping that section and now I'm removing the masking fluid. So the masking fluid there's a couple different ways you can remove it you can just kind of massage it like I'm doing now. You can take a white eraser like a nice hard white eraser and just rub it against it really you're just pulling it off. I have yet to experience like any pigment or any watercolor that it was on the masking fluid like scarring my paper but doesn't mean it necessarily wouldn't happen so I do try and be careful but in general you can be kind of aggressive with it. Now I'm going to massage these sections as well for two reasons. One see how those edges are so sharp and jagged I really want to soften them up but also the color that I'm going to be applying over this particular section that I'm working on is going to be very muted and so it's kind of like killing two birds with one stone. Now if you do make a smudge like I just did a moment ago on the left wing just add a little bit more water as quickly as you can and you know mop it up. If you work quickly you shouldn't be like too affected by the stain but if you don't work quickly it might become a problem. So again I'm massaging here and if I were to do it again I work instead with very light layers with a mostly dry brush with a little bit of pigment on it rather than trying to pick up the pigment that is surrounding the shape that I'm working on. You see how it's creating a nice gradient so like the center of those arches or the center of this circle is much lighter in comparison to the other sections. That kind of helps to enhance kind of the frills if you will the implied frills of this butterfly's wings like just little edges by kind of having that gradient in there so it comes and goes a little bit more softer this butterfly wing it's time to go in with some color. So this butterfly does have some color despite its mostly black and white appearance especially on the tips of the wings so we're going to have some fun with that. To start I'm going to go in with some ultramarine blue. I'm just going to apply this to these sections. Now it's kind of a dusty color so I allowed the black to kind of create a gray as I was massaging it in but in order to kind of play up that color a little bit more I'm actually going to be adding it in small doses kind of around the edges just to kind of give a little bit of color pop and to repeat the color elsewhere in the composition. I love doing this I love to take colors that are already in you know whether it's a butterfly wing or flower or whatever I'm painting and repeat it elsewhere in a way that isn't necessarily realistic but can add a beautiful dimension. So I'm doing that kind of towards the body of the butterfly and just in little ways to kind of help everything to pop. The nice thing about blue is that in so many ways we think of blue as a neutral so it's not going to be super shocking like if I were to add like a magenta here or something like that that would be pretty surprising but having just these little bits of blue really helps to add a little bit of visual interest and something that's unique to this butterfly and to my painting rather than even just a picture of the butterfly but also you know it's not something that you would notice right away it's very subtle. All right adding just a touch of blue up here but it's much lighter here than it is in the lower section so I don't want to get too carried away. All right I'm double checking my reference I am going to add some yellow in so these are just different yellow sections for this composition I use mostly the lemon yellow hue. I did I think add in a tiny tiny bit of either yellow ochre or cadmium yellow just to kind of help to brighten it up and to like really punch this punch up that saturation a little bit but for the most part it was pure lemon yellow hue and it's just like nice and bright and happy and lively and I really like how it ended up coming in so here's where I added a little bit of cadmium yellow just to kind of make it punch a little bit more and so I'm applying that over the section. Now if I were to do this again I would probably work lighter to darker rather than going in with the black and then trying to add yellow on top but this wasn't a bad way to go about it. I hadn't at this point experimented much with applying the masking fluid over a color so I didn't really want to mess with that. Now for the body of the butterfly I'm working with that same yellow but I added more yellow ochre or I've added some yellow ochre just to kind of desaturate it a little bit. I also think I added some hematite genuine which is the black that we were using again like it's just to mature it a little bit and to make it a little bit more saturated. Now here I'm going in with more of a traditional painting method and like kind of a lot of light layers that I'm just building up slowly in order to get this body. So a lot of the butterflies that I've worked with have had an almost black body. This butterfly has a very light body and it's very you can tell like you can see the texture and the fluff in it a lot more than in a lot of the other butterflies I've done. So I want to go in light layers in order to get that illusion but also just to show the modeling and give it a little bit of visual interest. So especially with something that is different and unique like from butterfly to butterfly like instead of having a black body or mostly black body having a lighter body to look at I really wanted to make sure that I got it right and it was like a showstopper. Now to continue building up this texture with these little bits I'm just adding a little bit more hematite, a little bit more of like the black tone and a little bit less of the yellow tone slowly as I'm building it up. And I will just again continue to desaturate everything and really help with my modeling so that it's not too bright or distracting. And here I'm just kind of blending it in. Continue to go back and forth working with the detail brush. I believe this is my number three and that was pretty much it. I really love how this one turned out. I love all of the color. I love that it has you know like that textured edge to the wings and then just the unique factor of having a lighter body rather than a darker body. If you enjoyed this tutorial I would love it if you gave me a thumbs up and I will see you with our next butterfly. Until then, happy painting!