How to Draw a Butterfly

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jay French at Jay French studios.com and I'm going to show you how to draw a butterfly today. Alright, let's start with the drawing of a butterfly, now we could do two angles, we could do spread open angles where you're seeing the inside of the wing, or you can do the side view where you're seeing the outside of the wings. And that's what we're going to here so we don't have to draw any repetition and waste time. Now the body of the butterfly is not very important, visually speaking, and it's not very detailed, so that works out. Basically a little oval with a little sphere on the end, they're usually all black so you don't have to worry about to many details. What we're going to do here is a Monarch, so they actually have white spots on their body, as well, but we're not going to show that right. The antennas usually end in a thicker bulb with a little curve. Legs are your standard insect legs, little curves and that's all you have to worry about there. Now the wings, there's the important part, think of a large teardrop as your general shape, now your Monarch, you have a little more of an angle here, and the end, this one is, oh, sort of a curve like that, and keep that curve, this one is just a little straighter. Top wing comes out almost the same place, swings way up, goes further, and the general shape is a backwards nest, like this, but again, you have this scalloped edge, it's pretty much going to be around the whole thing. Now you may be thinking that doesn't look right but that's because the edges are black and you may not notice, as easily, on a Monarch, at least, that the edges are scalloped like that. Now, we have a whole edge here that's black, I'm going to fill in real dark. But, I'll show you a trick for getting negative spot's cause otherwise you sit there drawing a circle trying to darken in around it and that can be time consuming. Well instead, I'm going to draw big lines, big thick black lines, then break them down into a grid. And what we end up with is a bunch of white squares, that may seem odd right now, but then if you go in circle on them, if you darken those in enough, you won't see where the lines are, you get your little white circles. Now I have the detail all completely. Okay , we have our black edge here. There is, essentially, three sections to this top part, that's about all there is to it, and a little curve inward at each point, and we have three big areas here that there are that distinctive Monarch golden orange, there's a little white spot fill that in so you can tell that that's orange. We have some more white spots here, again, we're not going to just draw circles and try to fill around them cause that's just to time consuming, we'll just make them sort of a grid then make them circles, and you have the top wing. So, lets' do the same thing to the bottom wing, except that it doesn't have the distinctive three sections. It has a bunch of sections, you don't have to get them exact because they actually do differ from butterfly to butterfly, Monarch to Monarch even, and just follow your picture source or just sort of make up some random things like this. Generally just center around a center diamond or teardrop and goes out to these tendrils from here and you just sort of stair steps toward the black area is, and the rest is black with white spots. And that's how you start with drawing a Monarch butterfly."