This DIY bunny and butterfly canvas wall art project is a sweet spring project. And, it has a dimensional twist that sets it apart from normal canvas art.
Take a closer look and you’ll see……
……those butterflies have 3D wings.
Even the wildflowers and stems have a raised texture. Perfect for a butterfly with 3D wings to perch on.
The butterflies on this canvas art are created from easy-to-use, air-dry Creative Paperclay. The wildflowers are added with modeling paste. Those textural elements bring the canvas to life.
The sweet little bunny is also shaped from paper clay, before adding the painted details.
If you have tried other paper clay projects, you already know how user friendly Creative Paperclay is. It has a smooth texture that is super easy to cut, sculpt, roll, mold, and shape. Once dry, it is sturdy and durable. You can paint, sand, and even drill holes through it. It’s incredibly versatile. Paper clay is also extremely lightweight when dry, which makes it perfect for creating 3D pieces that can attach to a canvas.
If you love canvas art that has visible texture, and if you love trying new techniques, you’ll enjoy this project.
Have fun!
supplies
- Heavy Body acrylics (Liquitex, Golden, or other quality brand)
- Golden Glazing Liquid (either Satin or Gloss is fine) or similar acrylic paint extender product
- modeling paste
- brushes suitable for acrylic paint
- palette knife
- inexpensive cake decorating bags and tips
- water container, rags, and mixing tray
- Creative Paperclay
- craft knife and rolling pin for use with clay
- Aleene’s Tacky Glue or other good quality craft glue
- Gorilla clear epoxy
canvas background
The base that I used for this project was a large 4 ft canvas.
To create a soft blended background, use Golden Glazing Liquid along with acrylic paint in these colors: Burnt Umber, Brilliant Yellow Green, Sap Green Permanent, Cadmium Free Yellow Light, Prussian Blue and Titanium White.
Since acrylic paint dries fast, the Golden glazing liquid is the essential element in this line up. It is a slow-drying extender that increases the open-time of the paint, giving you time to blend. It can also be used to thin the colors to make a translucent or transparent glaze for a soft watercolor look. Add it to your paint palette, and mix with the acrylics before applying them to the canvas.
Begin by brushing on the colors using a wide 1 inch or 2 inch brush, depending on how large your canvas is. Go for loose blended strokes.
It’s going to look pretty messy and rough after the first layer.
When the first layer dries, use the same colors, glaze and brush to add a second layer right on top of the first, building and blending the colors as you go. After the second layer dries, the background will look a little softer and more blended.
Keep adding layers and blending until you are happy with the background.
stems
for the large stems
To give the stems a thicker, dimensional element, I cut long stem shapes from Creative Paperclay, glued them to the canvas while the clay was still damp, and then painted them when the clay was dry.
Here’s how to do it–
Open the Creative Paperclay package and remove a handful-sized amount of clay. Keep any unused clay sealed inside the package or place it inside a resealable bag so that it will not dry out from being exposed to the air.
Use your fingers to roll the handful of clay into a long rope on a non-stick surface (like wax paper, a vinyl mat, or parchment paper).
Then use a rolling pin or wood dowel to flatten the rope out. A thickness of about 1/8 to 1/4 inch is good.
Next, use an inexpensive craft knife or plastic knife to cut out long stem shapes.
If there are any rough areas, you can smooth them using your fingers dampened with water.
Position the canvas so that it is on a flat/horizontal surface. Using a good quality craft glue, like Aleene’s Tacky Glue, squeeze a line of glue onto the canvas where you’d like for the stems to go.
Then, gently lift each clay stem off the non-stick surface and position it on the canvas over the glue line. Press gently and then let the clay dry.
The clay stems should air dry in about 24 hours at normal room temperature. For faster drying, you can place the canvas outside on a sunny day or near a warm heater if the weather is cold.
When the clay is dry, brush over the stems with a little paint, and then you’re ready for the next step.
for the tiny stems
To make the tiny stems that branch out from each main stem, an inexpensive cake icing decorating bag and metal tip works like magic! It’s just like decorating cookies, only instead of icing, the bag will contain heavy body acrylics mixed with modeling paste.
Decorating bags can be recycled or used again. You can also try a strong ziploc type bag if you don’t have a cake decorating bag. Word of caution though–don’t use cheap storage bags for this. I found out the hard way, on another project, that cheap bags will quite often burst open when squeezed. And then you end up with an altogether different kind of art–more like the Jackson Pollock variety. 🙂
To get the green stem color for the tiny stems, I used Liquitex Heavy Body Acrylic in these colors: Sap Green Permanent, Brilliant Yellow Green, and Cadmium Free Yellow Light along with Titanium White. After getting the right hue of green, I used a plastic palette knife to mix an equal amount of modeling paste with the green acrylic paint mixture on a plastic lid.
A plastic palette knife not only works well for mixing the modeling paste and paint together, but also does a great job of actually getting the paint/modeling paste mix into the decorating bag.
Adding the tiny stems is easy. Put the canvas on a horizontal surface. Squeeze the bag, and watch the stems appear. Connect the tiny stems to the large paper clay stems that you made in the last step.
blooms
To create the look of Queen Anne’s Lace wildflowers, use another plastic recyclable decorating bag.
Mix 1 part modeling paste to 1 part white acrylic paint. Then use the plastic palette knife to scoop the paint/paste mix into the decorating bag….
…and add blooms.
Just like decorating a cake. You can, of course, use a plastic palette knife to apply the paint and skip the bag altogether. But the decorating bag is way more fun! And it can be used in a precise way to get the paint exactly where you want it to go. After the paint is on the canvas, use the palette knife to knock down and shape some of the texture.
For some color variety, you can mix additional bags of paint & paste. I mixed a second bag with a pale green tint. Then I added more flower blooms in the new pale green color. I also added a few cream colored blooms. That added a subtle variation in hue, and kept the flowers from being too monotonous.
bunny
Now for that baby bunny.
To make the body, I first drew the outline of a giant bunny on craft paper to make a pattern. If you’re not great at free-hand drawing bunnies, find a bunny photo that you like, and trace around it to make a pattern. Or, if you need a really large pattern, upload a bunny photo to a site like BlockPosters.com, and you can enlarge your image to any size. Then just print and cut out the image. The BlockPosters.com website is a fabulous resource anytime you need things enlarged and printed, and it’s free!
Once you have your rabbit pattern, roll out a slab of Creative Paperclay to a thickness of about 1/4 inch–just like you did for the flower stems. Then place the pattern on top of the clay and use a sharp tool to cut out the clay in the same shape.
The size of your bunny pattern will determine the amount of clay that you need. Since I was working on a large canvas, my bunny was sort of gigantic–2 feet tall–so I used almost 3 packages of paper clay.
Next, put your canvas in a flat/horizontal position. Squeeze Aleene’s Tacky Glue onto the canvas, in the area where the clay rabbit shape will go. Now gently peel and lift the clay bunny off of the non-stick surface, place it on the canvas over the glue, and gently press.
When the clay bunny shape is dry, you can prep it for painting by brushing on a coat of gesso or flat paint.
Then use a large brush to start blocking in color. Along with the Golden Glazing Liquid, you will need these acrylic colors: Raw Umber, Naples Yellow Hue, Light Portrait Pink, Neutral Gray and Titanium White.
Use large brushes to blend and increasingly smaller and smaller sized brushes to get more detailed fur.
Use a fine detail brush to add the final fur strokes. Refine the eye, and touch up any areas that need more work.
And before long, that little rabbit will begin to look real.
butterflies
To create the butterflies, start by looking for images of your favorite butterflies to use as references. Once you find photos that you love, print them to use as patterns, resizing them if needed.
To make 3 large butterflies, you’ll need about half of a 16 ounce package of clay–the rest of the Creative Paperclay leftover from making the stems earlier is more than enough.
Roll out the paper clay on a non-stick surface until it is about 1/4 inch thick. Place a butterfly pattern on top and then cut it out. For each butterfly, you’ll need to cut one section with just a wing, and another section with wing attached to a small little body.
Move aside the excess clay. Then use your fingertips dipped in water to gently smooth away any rough spots around the edges of the wings.
Then return the leftover clay to the package and seal tightly. Let the cut out wings dry.
Left at room temperature, paper clay can take a while to dry. To speed up the process, you can place the wings on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, and then place inside a low temperature oven (170 – 180 degrees F). As the clay begins to dry and harden, the wings may begin to curl up slightly around the edges. You can place a cup or other object on top of the clay to press it flat, or if you like the way the wings look with a bit of a curve, you can leave them alone.
When both clay wings are dry, it’s time to give them some color.
Here’s an easy way to transfer the design of the butterfly wings onto the dry clay shape so that you have a guide for painting the details.
First, turn your paper wing pattern over, and use the lead of a No. 2 pencil lead to rub all over the paper back.
Then turn the paper right side up again. Place the paper on top of the clay wing, and use the tip of the pencil lead to trace over the wing lines and details, pressing firmly.
The pressure of the pencil tip will transfer the graphite from the back of the paper wing pattern onto the clay, giving you some guidelines for the detailed spots and lines on the wings. This method is so easy and works just as well as fancy graphite transfer paper.
Now it’s time to paint.
For the Clouded Sulphur butterflies, I used these Liquitex colors: Cadmium Free Yellow Light, Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber, and Cadmium Yellow Medium. I also used Titanium White and Neutral Gray.
Keep adding layers of paint, taking some artistic liberty to change things if you like. When you’re happy with the wings, set them aside to dry and then clean your brushes.
My favorite way to clean brushes is with The Master’s Artist Soap. It comes in a cute vintage looking wrapper like this:
But when you open it up, it’s a deep forest green with a wonderful spearmint scent. It works wonders on brushes. I’ve even used it on brushes that I thought were past the point of no return and it brought them back to life so that they could be used again.
It will gently clean not only your brushes but your hands as well. A 4.5 ounce bar like this one will last a long time, and it is great for cleaning up oil or acrylic paint, inks, dye, grease and stains.
glue and finish
When the wings are dry, glue them together, with one wing set at an angle.
First place an object over the bottom wing to serve as a support for the upper wing in the next couple of steps–I used a scrap wood block.
Apply a strong epoxy based adhesive like Gorilla Clear Epoxy to the lower part of the wing and body.
Then position the upper wing so that it touches the glue line.
The support piece (block) will keep the top wing elevated and positioned at an angle until the adhesive has dried.
Gorilla Clear Epoxy will set in about 5 minutes, but for this project, I let the wings dry for a full 24 hours. I wanted to be sure that the adhesive had completely hardened before removing the support underneath the top wing.
There will probably be an indented gap where the upper wing touches the body. Just use a small amount of paper clay to fill the space.
Here’s how the two yellow butterflies look after having the gap filled with clay.
When the clay patches dry, touch up the paint on the wings and body, and your butterflies are ready to add to the canvas art with the flowers and bunny.
I made the Painted Lady butterfly below using the same process as for the 2 smaller yellow Clouded Sulphur butterflies.
For paint colors, I used Burnt Umber, Quinocridone Red Orange, Burnt Sienna, Naples Yellow and Neutral Gray and Titanium White.
To attach the butterflies to the canvas, I used Gorilla Clear Epoxy again. Then when the adhesive had fully set, I used a little more white acrylic paint + modeling paste to add more white flowers over the top of the butterfly legs to make it look like the legs were perched within the flower blooms.
enjoy
Whether you make this art as a gift for someone who loves paintings of bunnies and butterflies, or whether you create it as a gift for yourself, I hope it brings you joy!
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