If There's a Cure For The Blues, Please Don't Tell Me

Sometimes, people who know I love blue will send me beautiful photos of blue Morpho butterflies. I actually have a framed Morpho on my desk. They are some of the most stunning creatures on earth. They are the world's most perfect blue, with a shimmer - nature's glitter. I would love to see a whole swarm of them in real life.

I was telling someone the other day that where I grew up, we had GIANT butterflies - just huge - bigger than a softball or a good sized Texas grapefruit. They were blue or yellow and they were amazing. Some of the other bugs that weren't nearly as pretty also got frighteningly large, but the butterflies made it all worth it.

When I saw that Moxie Fab world issued a "Cure for the winter blues" challenge, there wasn't even a second's hesitation in my mind about what I was going to do. It had to be the butterfly. 

So here's what I did. 

First, I inked up the butterfly from Wonderful Wings (retired) in Bashful Blue. I stamped off once, and then stamped it on a white card base. Then I filled it in with the same color ink for a shadow. 

Next, I wanted to do a Bokeh effect, because I've been playing with photography Iphone apps, and the Bokeh effect is one of my faves. I read about it for my real photography in this book - Creative Composition. Basically it just means little spots of light. To make my Bokeh, I took a pencil with one of those nice smooth white erasers (I don't use regular pencils outside of this application, so all my erasers are perfect circles) and I inked it on my blue ink pad and stamped all over the card. Then, I scribbled some metallic blue gelato onto the lid of my stamp case and misted it and used that with the eraser - you can see the shimmer in the photo above. 

To color the butterfly, I used a water brush and a PITT artist pen - big brush - to shade it. Then I went back over the dots on the edges of the wings with a metallic PITT pen. It's so shimmery up close - the sunlight kind of washes that out in my photo. I cut it out and I also cut in between the upper and lower wing sections for dimension.

The sentiment is retired, but one of my favorites - it's from Nature's Secret and my beloved Richard Bach. I'm so glad I kept both of these stamp sets.

If there's a cure for the blues, I don't want to know about it.

Loveyameanitbye.