Celebrating Butterflies with Hero Arts

 There's something so magical about butterflies, don't you agree?  That whispering lightness, those colors, the fragility in flight, all seems too perfect, and too slight to be real.   And yet...they are quite real.  

I'm delighted to help the Hero Arts design team kick off a magical, butterfly-filled release by highlighting just one of the beautiful digital images available today at Hero Arts.  

The Papillions Digital Kit  has 16 images to play with of beautiful detailed butterflies that will make you think you are a botanical artist lost in paradise.  There are also two other butterfly printables:  Butterflies and Butterfly Gardens - both are so whimsical and sweet AND each has a handful of sentiments that match the images perfectly...I'll be creating with them, too and have added them to my digital collection.  

But these butterflies, with their "come see my antique etchings" vibe...I knew immediately how I wanted to use them!

Here's my how-to: 

1.  I opened a blank slide in my google drive and added the black and white version of ornithopter--which has these three butterflies as a single image.  I blew it up slightly so that the edges of the images would "fall off" and A2 card front, and printed the slide with my laser jet printer on lightweight cardstock.  I colored the blutterflies using my Copic markers in shades of light blue, blue green, and yellow and then added dots in the same colors to create a background, as well as a subtle shadow, heaviest on the left side, to make those butterflies seem to hover about the card and add a bit of dimension.  

2. With my coloring complete (although with Copics, I'm never really sure if I'm done), I cut the slide down to 4X5.25 inches using my Nesting Rectangles Infinity Dies. 

3.  I ran the card front through my Minc toner foiling machine (you can use a laminator, instead), using an iridescent light teal blue piece of toner foil from my stash--soooo pretty!!  The iridescence really catches the light.  

4.  I pulled a piece of light teal foil cardstock from my stash and die cut it with the largest (A2 sized -  4.25X5.5 inches) of the Nesting Rectangles Infinity Dies.  This is the mat for my image. 

5.  I die cut "celebrate" from the Celebrate Words Fancy Dies, once in white card stock and once in yellow, using my Hero Arts Compact Cutter, which is just perfect for these smaller cutting jobs.  I really like these sentiments--they're the perfect size to get my point across, but don't detract from this full card front image. 

6.  And that's almost the end--I just glued/taped everything onto a white card base working, as always, from the bottom layer (foil mat) to the main image, to the sentiment on top--the slightly offset yellow celebrate is slightly below and left of the white one--mirroring the shadowing angle of the butterflies.

Fast, fun, and easily repeatable with this image or the other butterflies.  And while I love the foiling (have you noticed that it's a favorite technique?), this image would be equally stunning in the pre-colored images in the Papillions kit, or just printed in black and white (or maybe gray and white!) and colored in whatever medium suits your fancy.

And there's a giveaway!!  I hope you'll hop along with the rest of the Hero Arts designers and guests and do leave comments since Hero Arts will give away a $50 gift card, drawn from the comments left across the hop. Enter by Sunday, February 12th at 11:59pm Pacific, and the winner will be announced on the Hero Arts blog the following week.

One last look: 

Thanks so much for joining me!

Essie