fun, splashy abstract watercolor butterfly

Hi, Lynnae with Bloom Feather Studio here. I thought it'd be really fun today to do an abstract butterfly. I've done quite a few of these and they're really fun. They turn out differently each time I do them. I like to add a lot of splatter and splash and so today I thought it'd be fun to do a purple and yellow and blue one. You see this here. Here's an example of a different one that I've done with a really bright pink and yellow and blue. So today let's do the purple. So here are the colors I'll be using today. We've got lemon yellow here from Winsor & Newton. This is a lemon yellow and then Daniel Smith Quidacridone Purple. I love this purple. I have Hooker's Green and I don't have any more of that in the tube but it's just a common green that probably most people have. If you mix the two together you see it comes almost black. So we'll be using some Hooker's Green and Quidacridone Purple mixed together and maybe a little bit of Horizon Blue and also a bright blue Cerulean Blue watercolor pencil. So if you don't have a watercolor pencil that's okay. You can just use your paint and a rigger brush. It's like a really super thin brush to add some of those veins in and I might do a little bit of blowing with a straw. So you can blow just with your mouth if you want. You can blow with a straw or you don't need to add in the splashes. I'll show you the I'll show you some of the blown parts that are like this right here. I blew a little bit of here. Some down here at the bottom but it's up to you. You don't have to add that. Also we'll be adding a little bit of white gouache at the end. Whatever you have that's white. You can use bleed proof white. You can use gouache. You can use just any white you have around. I have some of this. What is this one? PH Martin's Pen White. You can use any of that stuff just to kind of add a little bit of extra ethereal texture to it. Okay so I have also just a regular kind of not huge brush. This one's my Winsor & Newton number eight but the brush isn't super important. It's just kind of you need it to push the paint around and that's pretty much it. So I've drawn out the butterfly and so what you can do is you can just go online. You can draw you can sketch a butterfly or you can go online and find a picture of a butterfly and just do like the half wing is what I like to do. Just or the half of it one set of wings and I've sketched it out. I don't know if you can see it. So I sketch it out and I put a few veins in there. So the veins are going to be blue. So I just use my blue colored pencil to add the veins and I sketched it out with my black colored pencil but you can just use a regular pencil. It's fine. I just want to make sure you can see all of this from the top to the bottom. Yes you can. So we're going to start out by wetting. I'm just going to get some water on my brush and I'm just going to wet the butterfly. I'm going to wet it all around the edges here. So you can't really see this probably that it's just going to wet it. I'm just wetting the edges. I have a little bit of a scallop here so I'm just taking care to make sure I wet the scallop part. Okay so if you want I'm going to wet the middle part of it too kind of but not you don't have to wet it too much. Okay if you want some splashes you can kind of add them in right now. So I'm going to add some splashes kind of right here so I'm just going to flick out with my brush in a couple places. I like to add some splashing right about here. Just kind of flick out with your you can add a few splatters at the edge. So I'm just tapping on my brush. Okay that's pretty good. Okay so it's wet. Now I'm going to come in with my blue and my green. So this is this is kind of a mess a little bit. Look at this. So I'm going to so this is oh sorry my purple and my green. So I'm going to grab it. That looks a little too green. You want it more on the purple side kind of turned into a really nice gray. I'll show you it. It's on here already but I'll show it to you again. See how nice dark purple that is? I'm going to go around and I'm just going to add some color right here at the center of the butterfly. I'm going to put a little more purple in that center of the butterfly. Kind of pull it out a little bit. Okay and then I'm going to carefully put some color right at the top tip of the butterfly here. So you see that top tip and then here in the middle. I really like these two wings to kind of match right here in the middle so one's not further out than the other. So I you see how they both kind of end at the same spot and then down at the bottom here I'm going to add some color down here too and just kind of let that bleed and then I'm going to go around the edges of the butterfly with the same color just really gently and actually I'm going to use let's see I'm going to use the rigger brush. See how that works. Grab some color with it just go around the edge carefully. Okay so that line's a little bit strong so I'm going to rinse off my brush. Rinse off my brush so it's nice and kind of pat it dry a little bit and go around and see if I can let this bleed a little bit. See that just kind of softening that line because I want it to bleed. Okay I'm just going to add a little more color there. There you go. Okay I'm going to keep an eye on that. Okay let's add it some more water and actually before I go around the rest of it I'm just going to make sure it's nice and damp. Okay now I'm going to take my rigger brush back here follow along the line. Same here go around those scallops. Okay this is a little it's a little bit dry so I'm going to wet it along here and also along here. Okay so now we've kind of outlined the butterfly. I'm going to go back in and just add some more color. Not too much paint on my brush. Kind of let it bleed a little bit. That looks good. So just play around with the edge a little bit. Make sure it's defined really defined. I like to define it really well but also make sure that it's blending and bleeding in a little bit so it's not a strong line. Okay okay now I'm going to come in with some yellow some lemon yellow and I'm going to add some to those splashes I made. So I'm just going to go along the edge here and add a little bit of yellow where those splashes are. Okay and then I'm going add a little more water. I think just kind of add some drips of water where I've put the splashes. Grab a little more lemon. Kind of tap my brush here. Add some more. Okay now I'm going to I'm going to use my straw and kind of blow a little bit. Turn it. I'm going to go kind of straight on with this. So turn it this way. You can see this. Yeah I look good. I'm going to add a little more splash. Okay now it's back. Okay now I really like when my splashes are yellow and not so much purple so I'm going to take some of the purple out of some of this. Just kind of use kind of a dry thirsty brush and pull some of the purple out and the lemon will stay. Okay that's pretty good. Now I'm going to add a little bit more lemon to splash. Okay that looks better. Now let's go in. So the middle got really dry so I'm going to add some more water here to the middle of the butterfly. I'm going to go in with my pencil and just kind of right um draw in some veins. So just kind of do it really softly. Tap it in. You don't have to overthink this. Just kind of look really kind of ethereal and I mean like a big. I make like two kind of big diamonds and then I connect them to the outsides of the like this to the outside. Usually where the scallop comes in like this is where I put a line there. I'm just gonna leave that for now and then I'm gonna take my paintbrush find some more find some light blue and I'm just gonna tap it and splatter some light blue. We need some yellow in here too. Maybe I'll tap in some blue in different spots. Okay and even if you want to put some blue in with these splatters out here that's kind of fun. Okay these get a little too heavy. You can take some of the water out of it. Okay now I'm going to add some yellow splatters as well. Some yellow on my brush. Okay if it doesn't splatter get some water. That's a big yellow splatter. I'm gonna grab some of that out. Okay all right now what we can do is we can do the front of this butterfly right here. Okay so for the body of the butterfly I like to keep it really really loose. So let's overthink it. Just kind of this one's actually I love this one the way it turned out. So it's just kind of like a few kind of slashes for the for the body. So let's see what we do. I'm gonna go right here at the base of the or at the top of the bottom wing and I'm just gonna do some kind of like a yeah like that like a like a rounded shape and maybe make a little just kind of don't overthink it. You can bring the color. Oh yeah so I forgot to tell you this is when I'm adding the purple. I got really dark purple and really dark green together and it kind of makes it black. It's really nice. Okay just kind of add some shape in there. Okay that looks pretty good. I'm gonna take my rigger brush and make the antenna coming up maybe some lines going down. There that looks good and I like to add a couple of like splatters especially down at the bottom maybe a little bit up here too. That one's really big but we'll just leave it that's fine. Okay so now we're done with the body and kind of to wrap this up I'm not rinsing off my brush. I'm going to get a little bit more of a purpley mix with this dark color and I'm just going to add a little bit a couple of dots at the top here at the ends the corners kind of just to put a little bit of character in. Okay and I'm going to take my rigger brush again with some dark and I'm going to go around the edges one more time making sure that your edges are still very damp just kind of to define them a little bit more. If it's too solid of a line too harsh go back in add some water or just actually go back in with your damp larger brush make sure it's cleaned off but damp and just kind of brush it out a little bit. I'm going to pick up some of this color here just go like that tip it it's a little too much water right here there's too much water there take all that out and then I'm going to go back in and add a little bit more purple. Okay so now we've got our butterfly almost done now here is where when it's almost dry still a little bit wet not too wet I'm going to grab some of the gouache so open this up make sure my brush is cleaned up okay and then just take some right off the top of the tube like that and then I like to let me put the top on this this likes to come out so I have to keep keep the top on. I like to use my palette and just kind of roll it around on the brush so it's not too gooey and thick get some water because we want to splatter it so we want to have it nice and watery okay that looks good and sit this down and then just go ahead and splatter so needs more water splatter some of that white this just adds a really nice like ethereal quality to it splatter it around maybe tap it in a couple places get a little bit more you can also add like a little bit of blue to it if you want I'm not going to do that but I have in the past there we go a little bit better I didn't mean to get it on the body okay just fix that here just clean off my brush and add a little more color to the body okay so this is pretty much done so you can play with it a little bit more add a you know a few more drops of color here and there if you want a few more splashes the charm of this really comes out later on as it's drying it kind of even if you have like a few like crackles in the paint it's really beautiful just keep an eye on it you can play with it a little bit more if you need to add a little more color here and there make sure that it's what you know really damp when you add the color so you don't get any harsh lines so let's just see how this dries and then I will come back and show you the finished dry piece okay okay so here it is dry pretty much dry I like to go around I like to look at it once it's dry and take my colored pencil and go around and highlight around the parts that are really white so for instance this part here um right here like just kind of go around with my colored pencil and accentuate that a little bit like right there I don't you don't have to highlight all the way around it in fact I might take some of this out if I can kind of got went a little crazy right here so yeah like that um yeah so this is the final result here it is um yeah let me know what you guys think um let me see what you've come up with everybody every butterfly is a little bit different so it's kind of fun to see what you come up with um so just you can post it on instagram if you want and tag me or um send it to me um if you if you don't want to post it you can send it to me um just message me direct message me all right um have a great week you guys have fun painting do a lot of splashing and splattering and I'll see you next week bye