Autumn Butterflies

THE challenge over at Mrs A's Butterfly blog this week, is to use Autumn colours for your butterfly. 

Well I bought a new set of three mica sprays recently and the set was called Autumn Leaves, so I thought this would be a good chance to try them out. I have to say I was a bit disappointed, because when I had mixed the sprays, (they come in powder form which you mix with hot water), left them a good while to cool, and let the pigments activate, and then sprayed all three randomly onto some white card, I found they were very dark colours, and not, to my mind any way, all that autumnal! One was gold, one a deep copper, and the third was dark blue (for Autumn?!). I also prefer a fine mist for mica sprays and however many times I tried, I could only achieve, 'blobs' of colour. This is my trial sheet.

On the plus side, you can see that when it catches the light, it does have a lovely iridescent shine.

I decided to use it anyway and I cut two different sizes of butterflies using memory box dies. I still felt they were a bit dull, so I then cut the corresponding fancy butterfly for each size, using copper mirricard, and glued them to the sprayed bases. You can't see it is copper. It looks almost black in the photo, but it is actually quite bright.

For the background, I, like many other folk at the minute, had a play with my new Brushos. I used some textured watercolour paper which I made very wet. Following advice on a youtube video I watched, I covered each of my paint pots with aluminium foil, and pricked four tiny holes in each one, and I found this worked perfectly. On my previous attempt I had found it difficult to use a small enough amount of each powder. This time I used yellow, orange and leaf green, and at the last minute I added a touch of red, and let the colours mix together.

I mounted it up on a plain dark brown card, and added a copper peel-off sentiment.

Well I shall now fly over to Mrs A's blog and hope she thinks that my sprays, being called Autumn leaves, are sufficiently Autumn colours for the challenge. To my mind, my background is nearer the mark, but the intention was there!

If, like me, you love butterflies, why not fly over with me and see everyone else's, and maybe even add one of your own.