Painted Rock: Trompe-L'œil Butterfly

Painted Rock: Trompe-L'œil Butterfly

This is my take on the trompe-l'œil butterfly, or hyper-realistic art, a favorite subject for painted rocks. For my models, I used a photo of an eastern tailed-blue butterfly and another photo of painted water droplets.

The paint is DecoArt Patio Paint Outdoor Acrylic, with a touch of blue paint pen on the inner part of the wings, smeared to blend (paint pen because I didn't have any ultramarine blue paint). 

I painted the shape of the butterfly in a light, thin coat of white, dabbing and laying it on using a small soft-hair filbert or bright brush. I added the shadow using a thinned mix of sand, chocolate brown, and black, lightly painted, drybrushing, rubbing--but also dabbing in those various neutral colors as needed to keep a natural look. For instance, if the edge got too sharp, I dabbed a bit of the sand color and then lifted some off using a paper towel. 

I used used an eyelash brush to brush and dab chocolate brown for the "black" wing edges, then added a few touches of black to better define them. I used several blues, thinly dabbed or lightly brushed to lay on the wing color. I used thicker paint for the blue upper-body color, and did the bottom part in thinned charcoal brown and touches of black, contouring the edges in the sand color. I added thin, white antennas, then dotted with charcoal brown. I detailed the eyes in black and white. I added a little very thin black in the shadow, touching the outer contour of the wings, to add better contrast between shadow and wing.

For the water drops, I used chocolate brown, sand, yellow, and white, painted using an eyelash brush. There are some good tutorials available to paint water drops.

The size of the rock is a little smaller than palm sized.

On that bottom water droplet, the slant on my shadow was a bit off, so I corrected it by dabbing around the outer edge with a bit of paint mixed to match the background. The body of the butterfly looked flat, so I softened it and made it look round. I still felt that the body needed more work. Some drybrushing of charcoal gray might have helped, but the space was too tight. I left well enough alone.

Below is my original photo, posted before corrections.