I’m so excited to share this cute butterfly drawing I created recently! I was commissioned by Teaching Tolerance magazine to create a 2 page spread for “Mariposas” in their Spring 2017 issue.

I created spot art to go with the editorial illustration for this article, too. Check out this fun hand lettering featuring a quote by Frida Kahlo:

My painterly line drawing style is so much fun to work in. There’s tons going on in the image, so it’s nice and challenging. And it brings together offline and online techniques, which gives my artist brain a little break from staring at a computer all day.

For this project, getting started was simple. I got out a huge stack of computer paper, and it was time to get to drawing a ton of cute butterflies, flowers, and of course our happy girl confidently raising her hand in school.

But once I’ve got a cute butterfly drawing… where does it go from there?

I thought it’d be fun to make a short photoshop tutorial to show a little of my process. Basically, once I’ve got all my pen and marker hand drawn elements on multiple pieces of paper, I scan everything into the computer and layer all of the bits and pieces together. Take a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxtfbuGUyyg

I wanna know – do you find the little box with me and Joy making our commentary distracting, or does it make your learning more fun?

I’m on the fence whether I’ll do the little picture in a picture thing next time.

Once all of the bits and pieces of line drawings are in place, it’s time to add the painterly textures:

When I’m working on a painterly line drawing like this one, I’ll usually use an actual, real world traditional paint texture like a big wash of watercolor in the background. Just scan that baby in, add a few adjustment layers to make it the colors you need, and you’re ready to layer in other colors on top!

The rest of the hits of color in this artwork are digital painting bits, and all of my colors are created on separate layers. That way if you send something colored up like this:

And it’s decided by all parties (even me!) that it looks a little too fall… 

If you keep allllll of your bits and pieces on separate layers in Photoshop, it’s only a matter of assigning different colors to your layers.

Bing, bang, boom. Spring and butterflies.

You can read “Mariposas” in the Spring 2017 issue of Teaching Tolerance Magazine here.