Custom Painting Butterflies in Photoshop
You can create these butterflies in any full-version of Photoshop (not Elements) from 7.0 through the current CS2. There are no special tools or plug-ins to download – everything you need is already present in Photoshop.
You might want to reference Illustration 02, which features full screenshots of the steps involved. Do keep in mind, though, that I’m able to go much more in-depth in this article than the image-version of the tutorial.
One: Create a new canvas (File, New), sized at 500 x 500 pixels with a white background. Then, set your foreground color to black and grab your custom shape tool (It’s the one that hides behind the rectangle tool. Right-click the rectangle shape tool, and choose the one that looks like a big splat). Look under your toolbar, and you’ll see a drop-down menu with a picture in it. Click that drop-down, and then click the arrow that points out. You’ll be given another menu. From this menu
choose “Nature”. This loads the nature shape set. Finally, select the butterfly shape – we’ll be using this as a reference. Drag the butterfly shape out on your canvas.
Two: Now you’ll want to think about the color scheme you want your butterfly to have. You will want to start with the lightest of three colors to create the first strokes of paint shown. First, create a new layer (Layer, New, Layer). Then, select your brush tool and set its size to about 10 pixels. Now, using the lightest of your three colors, start painting a series of strokes on the lower right wing as shown. They won’t be perfect – don’t expect them to be, and don’t stress on it. We’re only
doing one wing at a time so that we can make each side perfectly symmetrical, so don’t try to match the strokes on the left side, either – just do the right side.
Three: Select the medium of your three colors and a smaller brush, sized about 6 pixels, and “outline” the strokes. Then, select the darkest of your three colors and an even smaller brush, about 3 pixels, to outline those strokes.
Four: Now to make this look more wing-like. Grab your Smudge Tool (it hides behind the Blur Tool, which looks like a rain drop – just right-click the Blur Tool icon, and choose the Smudge Tool) and begin to smudge the colors. You’ll want to move your mouse in the direction of the strokes. This step can take some patience – try until you have something like the illustration.
Once you’ve smudged it so that it makes a series of “ripples”, zoom in and use a 1-pixel brush in black to add definition.
Five: Now, we want to do the same thing on a new layer to our upper wing. Follow the steps above to create an upper wing.
Six: We’re nearly done! First, turn off your background and the butterfly shape by clicking they “eye” icon beside their layers. Then, right-click one of the painting layers and choose “Merge Visible”. Both your top and bottom wings will be on a single layer now. Now, turn the background and shape back on and use your magic wand to select the area outside the butterfly shape. Select your paint layer with the selection on, hit the backspace key on your keyboard, and the wings are all “cleaned up”.
Our last step? Duplicate the painting layer and choose “Edit”, hover on “Transform” and click “Flip Horizontal”. Then, use your move tool to drag this layer into place on the other side of your butterfly. Beautiful!
Try adding an extra layer of color to the center of the wings, adding “dots”, or altering the shape of the black butterfly reference to come up with variations to your butterfly.
