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How to paint a Butterfly on a Flower - Free watercolor Demo

First of all I would like to apologize for this being a little backwards :( Wedding in 4 days and not alot of time to fix this. But I hope you can follow along. Pretty happy with the way this has come along time to put in the final details and darks in the wings.. sign it and call it a day.
please excuse the photography,the last image is the only one i take the time to try to get as close to real colors as possible. Working on the front wing you will notice that it is slightly brighter and rosier - a few washes of perm rose maybe one of cobalt in the center followed by a few more of perm rose finish off by a few of raw sienna and add some glow with a little lemon yellow. I save lemon yellow and any cads until the last - they dont seem to play well with others. ;)
going to go back now and fix that horribly bright background using a fairlay rick mix of paynes grey, this is quite transparent so all those pretty colors you mimicked in your background will still show through. Now doesnt that just make all the difference.. use the same light wash to tone done the stem. this will fuzz it out and blend it into the background. Off to the stem- now this was poor planning on my part. i should have wet the stem when i dropped in the background just so that i wouldnt have had to crop so much off the bottom - oh well - thats how we learn ;) First start with a light wash of raw sienna, then using a very diluted mix of diox violet put in your shadows the mixes of raw sienna and cobalt, maybe a little hunter green deep -- its all up to you. How bout mixing it up a bit and dropping in a little orange. Looking closely at the petals you will see there is hints of sap green in some of the petals and about 10 layers of color.

This is the big bad scary part to me - the darkest deepest part of this painting.. So i wet the entire area and just drop in the same colors i have used in the painting. hunter green deep (against the purples in the flowers) perm rose against what will be the the green stem... see where im going with this ;) You may be saying WOW tha is one bright background **but wait that will be rectified later on :)
Still bouncing all over adjusting values with thin transparent layers of color. making sure once again to have this dry between layers.
Getting a little lost on the values so I am going to pop in some real dark darks, I use a mix of cad red, deep hunter green, and diox violet, i only apply to the back wing, because in subsequent layers this will blur out giving the appearance of being behind the other wing.
I tend to bounce around alot establishing lights against darks, tones, and hues. I tend to paint a lot more tighter then most. Thinking in shapes and shadows rather then what i am actually painitng. The colors for the butterfly are raw sienna, indian yellow, yellow ochre, raw umber, burnt sienna perm rose and cobalt blue. Work slowly, in thin layers, step back go for a coffee, dont touch until dry. :)
Now that that is out of the way we can start painting. For the flower i am using perm rose, diox violet, cobalt blue, sap green, cad red. Start with any petal you choose, wet, STOP wait for the shine to almost disappear and start dropping in a fairly juicy mix of perm rose and diox violet just one the edges - if you look closely you will see the left hand back petals are more violet on one side and more rosier on the other.
First I would like to thank Miss Mouse of The wetcanvas ril for supplying such a beautiful image to work with. Lets start with the line drawing - i do cheat now that my husband bought me a projector. ;) but use any method you like to get to this stage. Make sure you pay close attention to where the shadows fall and where your brightest highlights are.
Hi everyone,
I would like to share this Paint-along to show the progression on how i got to the finished piece

Golden Wings
10" * 14"
Watercolor on 140 lb Rag
For Sale $200 USD
Matted and mounted

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