Boutique Butterfly

Aloha,

Minimalism coupled with sketched lines are the details that inspired this butterfly card from the AECP course Clean & Simple Boutique Cards.

This monochromatic card features an ornate flower and sketched butterfly from Altenew’s Lacy Scrolls and Painted Butterflies stamp sets respectively. The blossom, only partially stamped on the card front with Altenew’s Purple Wine dye ink, sits in the lower left corner. By stamping off the edge of the card, the flower’s rarity is emphasized, while also creating a plethora of white space in which the butterfly can travel.

Though Painted Butterflies is a layering stamp set, only a medium outline image of a butterfly in profile was needed for this card. The sketched look of the butterfly’s contours lends itself to the boutique aesthetic of clean lines with a hand-drawn look. Instead of stamping the interior layers, Purple Wine was lightly applied within the outline with an I-Crafter’s blending brush. Using such a small brush made creating a focal point along the center of the butterfly easy to achieve. Brushing repeatedly with soft, concentric circles intensified the color near the implied body line of the butterfly and also gradated the color to a whisper of a tint at the outer wings.

Finishing details for this card include a curving, hand-drawn flight path around the “thank you” sentiment, the latter of which is another example of partial stamping. A Post-It note was used to cover the “so much” in Altenew’s Parrot Paradise’s “thank you so much” sentiment before inking the stamp with Altenew’s Obsidian Black Pigment Ink. Then, the paper was removed prior to stamping the inked sentiment. Like the blossom, the truncated sentiment leaves a maximum of room for the butterfly’s flight.

The search for the perfect flower, evidenced by the flight path, drawn with a black Micron pigment pen, builds drama in this scene. When the butterfly finally finds the flower for which it has been searching and begins to eat its nectar, one might imagine the butterfly’s color transforming from limpid and pale to vibrant as that nourishment courses through the winged creature’s system. The blended gradation from intense to soft underscores this imagery and helps the search and its culmination coincide beautifully with the sentiment’s expression of gratitude.

Mahalo!