Making Your Own Watercolor Origami Butterflies

While leafing through the dusty old Paper Butterfly Scrapbook (featured in last week’s post), sheaves of photos fell out, all showing that rarest of species: watercolor butterflies. Their translucent wings glowed with color, and I became determined to create my own.

After much experimentation, I came up with the following instructions for creating our own watercolor butterflies. But be forewarned! As you can see above, as soon as they are created, they fly away.

 

Watercolor Origami Butterfly Instructions

The butterflies are made with Oriental Rice Paper, which can be obtained at your local craft store: look in the calligraphy department.

This paper is soft, and is difficult to cut if your paper cutter is not razor sharp. I used a T-square, pencil and scissors to cut my squares into 6″ and 7″ squares.

 

You can use watercolors or inks for this project. You will also need a paint brush.

Have ready a thick sheaf of newspaper on your work surface. (If you use ink, you might want to first cover your work surface with a piece of plastic, as ink can stain.) Then, totally wet your paper square. Just hold it under running water in your kitchen sink. Shake the wet paper out, and lay it on the pad of newspaper.

Note: The paper must be moist for this process to work. Handle the moist paper gently, as it could tear. The newspaper will absorb extra moisture.

I am making morning glory paper here. Just dab circles of blue dots, and then dab in a yellow center.

The finished morning glory origami paper.

You can also carefully fold your moist paper and dip the edges into ink for a tie-dyed effect.

Or, your can simply drop blobs of ink or watercolor onto the moist paper and see what happens. Here are some things I came up with.

Let the paper dry, and then iron it to make it smooth for folding.

Here are some butterflies I folded with these papers. The large butterfly is made with the morning glory design.

Last week I made another group of these butterflies. (Most of these butterflies are folded from a pattern created by Akira Yoshizawa. You can round off the wings with scissors, if you wish.)

A squadron of butterflies.

A closer look.

One last page fell from the scrapbook. It told of a butterfly who had flown so many miles that her wings had became torn and tattered. But she is still beautiful!

Peace to you. Fran