Priam’s Birdwing Butterfly and Others Watercolor Painting
Written by Teresita Blanco (The Artsy Sister)
It is so difficult to identify butterflies when you only have a photograph to work with. It was easy for me to guess what they were if I photographed them in the wild.
The ones you see in these two watercolor paintings were photographed in the Key West Butterfly preserve. They are not native to Florida, but the preserve provides them with all the flowers they need to live long and prosper.
I originally started painting one type of butterfly at a time. In the second painting, I showed you two. These butterflies all live in the same butterfly preserve, so, if you visit you are bound to see them together.
I prefer to paint butterflies that I have seen in the real world. The photograph is mostly a tool to help me execute the watercolor paintings. I try to capture in my artwork the joy I felt when looking at the pretty butterfly.
I am going through a bit of a bug phase. It is mostly Hollow Knights fanarts and Butterfly watercolor paintings. This is the current bulk of my artistic endeavors. Both paintings feature glitter watercolor paint.
They are a little bit thicker than traditional watercolor paints. So, I need to be clever about how much water I add to it, in order to give it a bit of a transparency. It is only in the real world that you can appreciate the shimmering glitter effect.
As soon as I run out of butterfly photographs, I am going to paint a different series. Plus, I am getting a little bored of the subject. It is important to switch things up a bit, every once in a while.
For those new to art blog, I am going to tell you how I made these watercolor paintings. I first drew it with pencil. I traced over the pencil lines with a waterproof ink pen.
Its waterproof nature is important to keep the ink from running off. Once the lineart was clean, I added the watercolor paintings. I first start with a blue background, I then paint the leaves, the flowers and lastly the butterflies.
I start with the dark tones first, before adding the lighter ones. If I do it backwards, the black paint is just going to bleed into the lighter colors. It is important to give it a couple of seconds for the black paint to dry.
This will allow you to glaze lighter, glitter colors over it in order to give it an interesting shimmering to the wings. I think I ranted enough about my watercolor paintings. I hope that this blog inspires you paint with watercolors.
They are cheap, and they are pretty easy to use once you left the logic behind them. You can get a lot of millage out of one tube of watercolor paint. Even if it dries, you can reactivate the paint by rehydrating it.
My first set of watercolor paints all dried up in the tube. I had not used them for years, so, that’s what happened to them. Rather than throwing them away, I add a bit of water into them to give them new life. Anyhow, my name is Teresita Blanco, the Artsy Sister. Bye, bye and God bless.
