22 Nov A Beginner’s Guide to Brushwork, Lesson #13

We are going to paint butterflies today! I was so excited to do today’s brushwork lesson! It’s amazing to me that what started as simple brush forms has progressed to painting beautiful butterflies in just 13 lessons. If you are following along with us, we are working our way through the book, Brushwork Elementary Brush-Forms by Marion Hudson as part of our homeschool art curriculum. The goal of Brushwork, Lesson #13 is to take everything we’ve learned so far – all the way back to Lesson #1 – and incorporate it all into our butterfly design.

No one can dispute the beauty of the butterfly. Today we will be using blue and brown to paint them. If you’re rather choose a brighter color to represent your butterflies, I imagine that that is fine as well. For today, we’re going to follow the instructions in the book, but I’m sure when we continue to practice, we are going to try some adventurous colors.

Redrawing the Design on Our Grid Paper

As we’ve mentioned in previous lessons, your grid paper is probably going to be different than that in the book. I say this because I looked everywhere for grid paper that was similar to the book yet never found it. So, we settled for what we could find. I would estimate that the grid paper in the book is about 1/2″ squares. Our grid paper is twice that, with 1″ square grid paper. As well, our grid paper is probably a different size overall. Because of this, the pattern in the book does not translate well onto my 1″ grid paper, so with each lesson I am redrawing the design with a few adjustments, as you can see below.

Materials Needed

• The book, Brushwork, Elementary Brush-Forms by Marion Hudson (also available online HERE)
• 1″ absorbent grid paper
• Watercolor paints
• Watercolor Paintbrush, we used a Princeton Velvetouch , round size 8
• A glass of water (not used for drinking)
• A small plate for mixing paint and water
• A napkin to dry the brush

Happy Handicrafts Video: Brushwork for Beginners, Lesson #13

Start with the Blue Paint

For this project, we started with the color blue, because it is the first color used along the top of our page. It’s also lighter than the brown, so it’s a smooth transition when we change paint colors later on. Using our grid, we counted the squares and determined placements for all of our blue brush strokes.

Once the blue components were complete, we moved on to the brown, creating the butterfly design.

This lesson came together quickly and smoothly. I can’t wait to practice with more colors and designs!

If you’re just finding us, you can get started with our first brushwork lesson and advance according to your skill. All of our videos are stored on YouTube at Happy Handicrafts. You don’t have to start with brushwork – we have paper sloyd, needle-felting, crochet, and more. Go explore and choose which playlist will be the best for you and your family! We’ll see you there!