Easy Beginner Watercolor Butterfly Tutorial

Hello and welcome back to the Blush Studio. Today we are adding to our watercolor butterfly series with this beautiful African Swallowtail. At least I think that's what it was. That's what I researched and what I found when I found my reference image. But if you google African Swallowtail this doesn't show up. So I'll link my reference image down below. And now I've already gone through and I've applied the masking fluid. So you can see those discolored areas on the like within the sketch, within the contour. I've already placed that down and it dried. And so now I'm just painting over it. And I like to use masking fluid because then I feel like I can go a little bit faster and I can be a little bit more free. Plus it's a lot easier to create a very consistent gradient around the masking fluid if you don't have to kind of like dance around those parts that need to stay white. So that's why I use masking fluid a ton with my butterfly illustrations. I don't use it a lot, oddly enough, with other forms of illustration, but for butterflies I use it almost every single time. And so for right now I'm actually testing out this Daniel Smith palette that I recently purchased. And I'll have a full review on it in a little bit. But I'm using this color Moon Glow and it's very dark. Even though the butterfly that I found the reference image for is kind of a black and white butterfly, I'm really playing with color with this one because this deep color has like a cool purple undertone but it will actually really split or separate and show different values of like blue and purple. And I'll show you, you know, a little bit later kind of just how that happens. But even if you look in my mixing pan you can see how the blue has separated a little bit from the rest of the purple. And that's kind of what I'm talking about when I'm saying that like it'll separate a little bit where the areas where it's a little bit lighter. So normally I do not like that. But when I realized that that was happening in my palette, and with this paint in general, I decided I wanted to use it to my advantage somehow. So I decided to make this butterfly a little bit less realistic color-wise than my the butterflies that I've done in the past. But we can still like really have fun with it and it can be really playful. So I'm kind of just, I'm adding the black in here but I'm trying to keep it a little bit lighter towards the center. So on the exterior of the wings it's very dark and then on the inside it is lighter so as it leads into the white section. Now as I'm doing these delicate lines I switch to my number four round. I was previously using a number six which is kind of my go-to especially for these butterflies, but I found that I really needed that number four to get these nice and light. And I've mentioned this in my other butterfly tutorials, specifically the one that's on the lower left right now that has the black and the yellow. I like having the veins kind of come and go a little bit. So for this particular butterfly and for the butterfly that's in the lower left I kept them a little bit darker in value, the lines darker in value towards the base and then lighter towards the center and then they would get darker again as they came to the body of the butterfly. And that's just something that I have just enjoyed doing. I feel like it adds a little bit more visual interest and depth but I don't think it's necessarily required to have a good butterfly. It's just again something that I'm really playing around with right now. I'm just continuing to slowly work on these lines. This is a little bit faster. I sped up the video just a touch than what I actually painted it as. So feel free to go slow with this. This should not be rushed. Now the colors that I'm pulling out now I'm just kind of pulling them out placing them on my palette. Again I'm just testing out this palette for the first time and I'm trying to decide kind of which colors I'm going to use to accent the colors that are coming through on the moon glow. So I've pulled out imperial purple, I've pulled out my magenta as well as a little bit of the lunar blue and I will be pulling out some cascade green. But we'll kind of like look into that a little bit more later. And so now I'm just doing repeating these steps from the bottom and I'm going to do them at the top. So I'm starting on the outside. I ended up switching back to my number six brush eventually here. Yep there we go. Just so I can lay down more pigment because again I want the exterior of this black section to be darker and kind of have that gradient towards the middle. This isn't required, it wasn't really on the butterfly, but it helps to add some depth and some visual interest to something that is normally very flat. And that's kind of what I like to do especially if you're going to be illustrating something. Why not have a little bit more fun with it? Find ways that you can play it up, that you can really add some of that interest, some flair, some of your personal style. And just yeah again it's just some interest to it. So I decided to have that gradient and continue it throughout the butterfly instead of having all of my colors flat. I don't really want it to look like I just cut it out of paper that I'm using watercolor, so why not allow the watercolor and just those aspects of the colors flowing in and out and the value and really playing that up. You can see here as I'm applying it I have a lot more water on my brush. It's not as thick and I'm going to just kind of place that down and I'll add a little bit more color to the exterior section on the left in order to kind of help that to build up and still be nice and thick but I want that to be a nice even gradient. I feel like I did better on this section than I did on the lower section of this left side of the butterfly. So it's just kind of like playing around with it and trying to get everything to work the way you want it to. Applying color before everything dries which is the trickiest thing to get that nice even gradient and not having too much water on your brush so that you don't end up with like the clouds or the kind of the effects of when paint dries at different rates. It'll have kind of that billowy cloud section where that I don't I just don't want in this piece but is really fun for modern watercolor. Brush and I'm taking just a little bit of this paint. This is mostly my brush is mostly dry. There's not a lot of water on here because I want this line to be nice and thin and I want it to be a little bit more exact because this is just a detail that I'm adding in and that's the biggest thing if you are working with watercolor when you're kind of trying to decide do I want this to be a little bit looser and a little bit more organic is it okay if like some things go outside the line then you'll want to add more water especially if you're trying to push color around quickly and you're trying to get like an even coating you'll want more water where if you're going for those little details and you want it to be a little bit more exact and very precise then you'll want less water and I tend to work pretty dry personally just that's just my style that's just kind of how I've learned to do watercolor in a way that I like it and but other artists will do a lot of wet on wet and really love and play off that bleed well. You'll see how I'm deepening these sections just a little bit as they're closer to the body of the butterfly that just helps to create a little bit of visual interest and depth and we'll be adding a lot of that interest in with the colors for this butterfly but I still want to have like a really strong base and really what's happening is I'm nervous to do the veins on the top half of the butterfly so I'm stalling working on the top half and again I'm just kind of going really slow trying to really mimic the actual butterfly so I'm playing around with color on this one a lot where the colors aren't as realistic I'm using a very plummy purple blue that or black that kind of divides into blues I don't know if you can see the top half of this butterfly that section where it's a lot lighter towards the bottom of the wing where my pen or my what is that brush where my brush is at right now there's a little bit of blue that's kind of broken out there and you'll see it more at the close-up photo when we're done but that is really pretty not usually the style that I go for but if I'm going to work with that I'm really going to play it up and see if I can use it to my advantage and repeat it in other areas so that it looks very intentional I don't want it to look like a mistake. Now you could mimic that same effect by mixing a very dark plum and then before everything is dry dropping a little bit of like a bright turquoise in there in that section and that would kind of mimic the same effect. The advantage I have right now is that I have a paint that kind of does it on its own but if I were to try to mimic that I'd just be dropping in colors wet on wet so while the paint was still wet again taking whatever color I want to have like reflected in that and dropping it in and you would again get a very similar effect and you can even be more purposeful with it and have it repeated elsewhere. Okay we're speeding up just a little bit I ended up painting the left side on an Instagram live and so I'm going to basically be repeating all of these steps on the right hand side. I've already got a slight wash in for the body of the butterfly and I'm just going to deepen that now. I'm again taking that same color that same moon glow color that's the color we're using the whole time and again if you want to mimic something like this I would go with kind of like a plummy black so whether you're mixing that yourself with purples and a black you could do and then kind of dropping in some of those like turquoisey colors in different areas when it's still wet and then you'll get a very similar effect. I'm starting off on the side and it looks like I'm using my four round brush and I'm just building up the color on the edge first and that's in order to create some modeling. I don't want to get too dark too fast or else it will look really flat which would be super weird since a lot of our you know the work that we've done already on the wings has a lot of depth and a lot of that gradient in there so it would be really it would be short-sighted to do that too early. I do have some little areas that are highlighted and I basically just put the masking fluid on there so you'll see that the paint is being repelled in certain sections. I end up taking the masking fluid off and applying the same color but I'll apply it much softer so that it is a highlight and this is a slow process because again I really want to build it up. I did basically the same thing when we painted the watercolor bumblebee a few weeks ago and so if you're interested in like seeing more about that and seeing different steps you can go see that video as well. And now with these antennae usually I keep it pretty consistent like a consistent color and value all the way down but I decided again we're having fun with this depth and this different value change so I want it to be nice and deep at the tip so very dark and then as it comes towards the body I want it to lighten a little bit and then get again when it's at the body have it kind of pop a little bit and be a little darker. I usually like to have it pop towards the body so it looks very intentional when it's placed there so it looks like I did this on purpose not like it accidentally ran into the body. Okay so now that the body is ready it's time to start playing with some color. After looking at the different colors and just kind of comparing them to each other I've really been favoring the magenta especially for the exterior section of the wings so I'm taking again a mostly dry brush this is on my number four round and it's mostly dry I'm just pulling up a little bit of that pigment and doing just kind of a subtle wash. This is one of those things that on the computer you can't see it as well except for as a whole you can tell that it's kind of got this technicolor aspect to it and I've really enjoyed that. So again I'm just doing these light washes and I can build up the color as I go. I'm not adding a lot of water I'm not really cleaning my brush in between I'm just taking that color okay a little bit more sweeping it across and then I know that I'll be able to go back and build it up as it dries if I need to because sometimes it's just like not popping up quite as much as I want it to. So I'm only doing this on kind of that top section or the top half of each of these individual sections created by the veins of the wings. That's just to kind of have some rhythm and some flow to it so there's that repeated element where it's always at the top but it also doesn't become too overwhelming. I feel like if I had too much of the same color it would just it wouldn't look as elegant and graceful. It just looked like I just slapped a bunch of color on which again I'm trying to avoid. This is a really really soft very quiet color that I think makes a big impact when it's all together. Okay now that we've pulled it in a little bit you can see a little bit more how I'm building up this color. I have kind of this sweep of color and I'm just slowly pulling it in and building it up. As it dries I might add some more layers or help it to pop a little bit more in the corners. Looking at it now I think I would have in hindsight popped it a little bit more towards the exterior but I also really like how it's nice and soft. It's one of those effects that in person is very stunning and kind of has an iridescent look to it where on the computer for this video it doesn't look quite as shocking as it would. Now I've dipped my pen or my brush into the lunar blue a little bit to try and mimic some of the blue that I'm placing on the interior of the wing. So towards the body I know I want to have some shadowing just because again that's something that I like to do to help create depth and some visual interest but instead of just doing it with the same moon glow I decided to pull in Daniel Smith's lunar blue and just pull it in. It's a very neutral blue or a very dark blue but it has some beautiful variations with like some blues and greens in there so I thought that would play up the moon glow really well. I actually end up pulling out another color which I'll show you guys in a minute but I'm just really playing with this and trying to get a little bit of depth. I decided to add a little bit to the exterior where I normally would have some pink but just to kind of add a little bit of variety in there so it's not too predictable. I want this to be a really interesting piece. I mean why not if you're going to play with this much color let's have some fun with it right? And now you can see how exciting my life is that this is me playing with a ton of color but it's unexpected color it's bright colors it's like if a unicorn turned into a butterfly. For me this would be kind of the graceful a more mature version of it. I'm not really one to play with magenta as a whole lot or to pull those in so having like the magenta and the teal in this butterfly that's really black and white for me is very very adventurous. So for this I'm kind of coming from the opposite side so it's almost like if each individual vein could be broken up into like a square or polygon I am working on opposite corners so the pink is in the lower left hand corner or the lower right hand corner and then the blue tone is in the upper right hand corner or upper left hand you know what I mean. I'm just slowly building that up softening it with my brush as needed and not a lot of water added to this it's like really a damp brush that has a little bit of that pigment in it and not a lot this is a pretty rich color so it doesn't take a lot to translate it onto the page. So now I'm taking a little bit more of the moon glow and while I'm allowing the lunar blue and the magenta to dry I'm just going to go over these details. So these little sections that are left white on the exterior of the wings and his little eyes I'm just tracing those now again just to give the blue some time to dry so I can see okay do I need to kind of punch it up a little bit in different areas or do I need to maybe soften it. All right so it doesn't take long for it to dry because it was mostly dry when we started it. Now this cascade green color that I have up here the color in my pan if you're looking more towards the upper left you can see how it's much more green well if you spread it out and add a lot of water to it it develops this very bright turquoisey color or teal depending on what you want to call it. So I allowed it to separate and I'm pulling just from the teal I'm not pulling any of the green out that's kind of on the lower half of this little blue cloud that I'm working with and I'm using that to kind of really punch up the color towards the body of the butterfly so it's at the very bottom of the wings and I'm just doing a little bit because I really felt that the lunar blue didn't have quite enough personality so if I'm going to have magenta on a black and white butterfly that isn't really supposed to be there I'm going to pump up that teal and really play it up. Now you don't need to have this color you could probably make a similar teal with the colors that you already have in your palette and you don't need a lot to really make that impact I was just kind of adding those little bits and I love the overall effect that it gave it just gave a little bit more of a punch. So now I'm letting that dry seeing if I want to add more later and I'm taking my white eraser and I am just rubbing it over the masking fluid to help it to kind of ball up and come off and so I'm pulling that off and pulling that away and then I'll get you know the upper section and then the section on the body of the butterfly as well. Now you can see when I take the masking fluid off it has that really rough texture on the edge not on every aspect of it but definitely there are areas that are rough and don't look as graceful or purposeful so I'll show you how I kind of soften those a little bit in a minute. Now if you're working with a lot of tiny pieces like this one right here I actually recommend using it's called a I think it's a mono zero let me pull it out it's a mono zero eraser by Tombow I'll have it linked down below but I love this for detail illustration but it's also great for taking off my skin fluid and so here you can see I'm just adding like that shadow so that there's that continued modeling that's consistent throughout the body. So I'm taking a little bit of Moonglow on my brush again it's not it's a mostly dry brush and I'm just softening some of these harsher edges to make them look more intentional. Now I have to be very careful because I want it to mimic the gradient that I already have on this lower part of the wing because it does I like that it has that gradient where it's like that really deep um at the swallow or the tail and then um it's much lighter as it goes into the body of the wing. I'm just slowly building that up kind of taking out any edges that are too crisp or anything that you know just was taken over a little too much by the masking fluid and sometimes that happens masking fluid can be really hard to control. If you'd like to hear my tip for masking fluid um just for using it without kind of ruining your brushes I'll have that video linked down below it's just kind of a quick tip tutorial video but it's been super helpful for me. So that was pretty easy to fix I'm just doing this top section and then we'll get into those final details. Sorry about the shaking camera I probably coughed. I have my detail brush handy my number four I'm just kind of finalizing some edges anything that I see that needs to be fixed I'm kind of fixing that now. Now if you look on the left wing you'll see that there are these white sections that kind of have a scalloped look on the edge of the very like tips of the wing and so I'm just kind of defining them now. I didn't have masking fluid on them you know for the top of the wing even though I had it on the center section because it wasn't surrounded by the black and so it was pretty easy for me to avoid that but I definitely could have done it and could have stressed even less or thought even less about what I was doing. While pulling that down I saw that compared to the left hand side the right hand side didn't have quite as graceful a movement so I'm adding that in but also trying to make sure that I don't lose the gradient that I've kind of created for this side of the wing. It looks like I added some water just to help move the paint around. Popping this section I love kind of the semi-transparent quality of this where you can see the wings within each other or through each other. I think that that's really fun. So again this section going nice and slow just trying to make sure that everything is smooth and looks really intentional. When I say intentional in artwork you never want something to look like it's a mistake. You want it to look like you did it on purpose and part of that is because a lot of times when we do artwork if it's if it looks right people don't notice things but if it looks wrong everybody notices. Just kind of like if you're at a concert and you know the sound blows out suddenly everybody's looking at the sound guy where otherwise they wouldn't have even noticed that he existed. Same thing applies to art if there's something that looks off it looks like you made a mistake. So even things sometimes that you do intentionally if it doesn't look intentional it'll look like you don't know what you're doing or you made a mistake or you know just like you're not sure what you're doing. So that's one reason why we really want everything to look very intentional. That means working on fussing with lines to make sure they're nice and smooth. If there is kind of that separation of color okay well how can I repeat that elsewhere so it looks very obvious that I did that on purpose which is really what inspired this butterfly in general. I did not plan on doing all these crazy colors but when I had this paint that separated I wanted to challenge myself to see okay how can I make this color that I would never go for normally I didn't know it separated like this how can I make this look intentional and I'm doing one of those things right here. So I'm mimicking one of the colors that separates from this paint by taking my magenta and adding it to the details of this white section of the butterfly. I'm just adding that to the edge and again it's not a lot but it will help to reflect and kind of unify all of the colors that are being separated from that moon glow color which is you know the main body color. I'm just continuing to add some depth there make sure it looks nice and round. I hope I do more to the body I can't remember if I end up adding more to kind of the edge of his belly. That's looking a little bit flat to me if not I might be painting after I edit this video. Turquoise out and even though it's at the center of the wings like close to the body I decided to repeat it elsewhere and so I'm putting it just at the very tips of the swallowtail. I thought about doing the pink but since I have the pink around all of the other sections that are kind of isolated I really wanted to kind of pull in something a little bit more unexpected or at least a little bit different but I think I did do this section pink. Yeah definitely pink. If you did don't forget to give me a thumbs up and leave any questions or requests you have in the comment section down below and until next time happy painting!