One of my friends asked for a painting and I decided I was going to try to paint him a butterfly. My first attempt was pretty much a failure. The butterfly's body (black region) is WAY too big and I hadn't learned how to properly stretch canvas yet, so after I painted it and went to stretch it on the frame, the painted area was too big and the wings and the bottom of the body were cut off. Oh well, I'll paint over it and use the canvas for something else.
Butterfly 1, 2012, 26 x 34 inches, acrylic and water on canvas
The second attempt turned out a little bit better. I saved enough room on the edges to account for the canvas needed for wrapping around the back. Also, I decided that I didn't want to do a monarch butterfly, so I tried this other, more colorful one. I heavily diluted the paint so that you could see through each of the different paint layers, in an attempt to give it a feeling of being extremely thin and fragile, like real butterfly wings.
Butterfly 2, 2012, 37 x 37 inches, acrylic and water on canvas
I got lucky with the color of his walls.
