Yesterday I spent the day drawing butterflies. Last week I asked my husband to bring home a pile of books on butterflies from the library that he works at. I spent the morning looking at the books gathering information.
Then I drew butterflies, and more butterflies. They are such pretty creatures!
The butterflies are to go on a curtain that a magazine has asked me to do. Because of the type of stitches I’m going to use, I needed to simplify the drawings down to plain line drawings with only a little patterning.
Because I don’t have a scanner, I took photos of my drawings and loaded the photos onto my computer. I then traced over the photos in Illustrator, so that I had neat line drawings. I was then able to resize, flip, move and turn the butterflies into a pleasing design.
The design has now been submitted to the magazine for approval, and when its okayed (which may be after some changes) I’ll go ahead and stitch it.
It was very relaxing to spend the day with butterflies. Happy sigh.
White Threads is the blog of Yvette Stanton, the author, designer, publisher behind Vetty Creations' quality needlework books and embroidery products.
Sounds rather like my technique for improvising the effects of a scanner! And what a lovely day you’ve had. . .
Can’t wait to see it! I collect butterfly images too.
Your visual reference file must be absolutely HUGE. Is there anything you don’t collect?! 🙂
I like natural objects – flowers (roses most of all), leaves, insects, birds, butterflies….that’s all I collect. You won’t find houses, people or ships (traditional sampler fare).
But yes, er – I do have a lot of what I do collect. And SO many URLs pointing to images to ‘process’ into my image files that I haven’t done yet….