Vellum Butterflies

I admit, I rarely see butterflies these days. Hopefully this is down to my suburban living rather than a decline in the pretty insects. They are like little delicate moments of beauty fluttering by, aren't they? I've sought to capture that in my cards by using vellum to create the butterflies.

Vellum seems most appropriate for making butterflies with its opaque qualities. To make the blue butterflies here I used my watercolour pencils to colour in a block area on the vellum. I put down Night of Navy first then added some smaller areas on top of Rich Razzleberry and Old Olive. Then with little water, I went over the top of it with my aqua painter. (Too much water will mean your paper will dry curled up which you don't want.) A little curling is effective, too much and you have a dead butterfly!

Another way to create vellum butterflies is to use the gorgeous Floral Romance DSP which has some vellum sheets in the pack. I've punched out butterflies from one of those sheets in the card below.

You might have noticed that I've made these cards a slightly different shape to usual. They are the dimensions of half the USA letter size paper (which is what the American demos use for their cardstock) rather than half and A4 which we use in Australia. I did this so that the Rectangle Stitched Framelits would fit the card better. (I will do a tutorial video on this. Subscribe to my YouTube channel here to get notified of my videos.)