In the last few weeks I had to travel by plane quite often for my work. I prefer hand luggage, but this means that there are restrictions on what I can take along. No scissors, no tweezers, things like that

My hotel is situated along a high way, so nowhere to go in the evening and I get easily bored watching TV every night, so I read a lot. After finishing all my e-books I had the idea to start drawing again. It had been so long, luckily I had brought my Bamboo iPad stylus

After some research I decided that SketchBook Pro would fit my drawing needs best. While playing around a bit, I was immediately intrigued by the symmetry button which sits quite prominently on the top ribbon and wanted to draw something using the option...Butterflies of course!

Since I haven't seen enough butterflies up close enough to draw one good enough from memory I searched Google for a nice photo of a Monarch butterfly (my favorite one after watching one of BBC's episodes of Great Migrations (I think... it was a documentary about Monarch's at least :) )

All I had to do was turn on the symmetry option (red circle) and draw a wing shape until finally I had a shape that I could use as a base

From Adobe Photoshop I was already used to the concept of Layers, incredibly useful! And thankfully, the image doesn't adjust when you turn the iPad upside down

Several layers, a lot of brush strokes and even more hand swipes (Undo) later I had created my first Monarch, actually having only focusing on the left part, the right part was created simultaneously by SketchBook. As you can see, I prefer a mildly rough way of drawing, not trying to make every line perfect

Another night, wanting to draw another butterfly, I chose the beautiful green New Guinea Birdwing to draw, again first searching a nice photo online. The problem was that I couldn't quite choose my colors in SketchBook to match the ones in the photo. Searching online some more for solutions, I came across an incredibly useful app called Palettes. It does exactly what the description says

"Palettes is a powerful productivity tool for creating and maintaining color palettes ... Grab colors from a photograph, a website ..."

So I loaded the photo from the Birdwing into Palettes and it automatically found the colors I needed

Now I only needed to remember the corresponding RGB code, use it in SketchBook and finally I had the green I was looking for. Below is the resulting butterfly, again taking about 1-2 hours to draw

I am very pleased with all the options of SketchBook Pro. Only downside of drawing on the iPad that I found for now: the stylus has quite a big diameter, so drawing small lines is difficult, because it usually doesn't end up on the exact location I wanted it. But this can be solved by zooming in quite a bit (except when the line will become very long and doesn't fit on your screen anymore when you zoom in). But it beats the price of those amazing Wacom Cintiqs ;)

After Easter I was left with several of those sort of creepy twisted twigs. I actually like them a lot. I find them a lot more interesting with all their kinks and twists than just a regular stick. Therefore, I wanted to see if I could use the twigs and create something that could possibly be a more permanent addition to our living room

From previous random searches for new craft ideas I had a few ideas I wanted to try. In the end I made 4 Pom-poms and about 8 origami butterflies and attached these to the twigs using floral wire. Really easy, it took me about one saturday afternoon 

Pom-poms
I made the Pom-poms from 5 layers of tissue paper of about 15 x 25 cm. For the full instructions look here.
At first I used Crepe paper, because I had never heard of Tissue paper in the Netherlands and thought it was virtually the same. I wasn't very pleased with the result, the crepe paper was just slightly too... thick I guess. My luck, I had to go to London the next week, had some time to spare at Hammersmith so I visited the Papercraft store. Then I suddenly saw a packet of paper labeled as "Tissue paper". I was curious if it was really different than Crepe paper and took along one packet of blue tissue paper. It feels a lot thinner than Crepe paper and I was definitely more pleased with the resulting Pom-poms. I used floral wire to attach the Pom-poms to the braches. They are very light so I could did not have to stay near the beginning of the branches, but could spread them out across the entire set-up

Butterflies
I think that the butterfly design that I liked best is not the "regular" design. This butterfly has no clear body in the middle, but that was the main reason I liked these best; simple but very recognizable. There are very easy to fold, after only two I could do it on my own. You can find the full folding instructions here. 
I did use a bit of glue to keep the back properly attached to the front (I think you will understand what I mean when you try to fold one yourself)
I put the floral wire in a fold on the back of the butterfly, left about 5 cm between the butterfly and the point where I twisted the wire around the branch so I could get the effect that the butterfly was "flying" near the branch

I am still not sure if I should add more butterflies, I am afraid it might get too crowded. Perhaps I'll leave it at this for now, I can always add more in a few weeks if I want to :)