3D Paper Butterflies

Sometimes I just like to make embellishments for fun.  Usually they're tests for cards, scrapbook pages, tags I have in mind, for my Etsy shop, or I really have no idea what to do and I just want to make something pretty.  I ended up refining these butterflies from decorations used at my daughter's birthday party.  Long story short, my aunt (who hosted the party) wanted me to make some decorations, showed me some pictures of butterflies, and I ended up making some 3D paper butterflies we could plaster around the place.  They aren't terribly big, 2"x1.75", but I thought they stood out against contrasting colors.

Since I didn't have a ton of time to get these done, I made a quick butterfly design in Adobe Photoshop that would fit my EK butterfly paper punch.  The design took me 5 minutes.  Photo credit goes to a friend, Mary, who does some very nice macro shots.

That was over 2 months ago, and I liked the initial idea and wanted to simply make it a little nicer.  I kept the general design, but I cleaned up the lines so they're smoother (at least to me).  I didn't necessarily take a ton of time with them, it probably took me 10-15 minutes, but in the end I came up with something I liked.

I made a lovely pastel rainbow of colors.  Each butterfly is 3 layers, the middle is vellum, I like how it turned out.  It's very subtle.

Once everything was printed out, it was only a matter of punching them out and gluing the suckers together.  It was a pain to get the design just right so it would punch out correctly, I kept going back to adjust stuff.

Curious to how I printed out a pattern to punch out?  Basically I punched the pattern out on a paper, scanned that paper (with the lid of the scanner up, so I got a nice black shape), and from there I just used Photoshop to create one wing, I doubled and flipped the wing over, made the body, did a test print, fixed/adjusted as needed, and I was done.  I can print out 16 per page.

I don't always do things the easy way, but I tend to find a way that works for me.  Since I'm most familiar with Photoshop, I use that.  If you're familiar with another graphics program, go for it.  I'll take a look at other punches I have and maybe try to make some more... maybe.