Painted Butterfly Mounts

I would love to have my house look like a quaint little cabinet of curiosities with a collection of plant and animal specimens, but unfortunately, that costs money. Follow along for a fairly quick and inexpensive method for making your own handpainted butterfly "mounts".

For this project, you need:

• A picture frame- I recommend picking one up from a Goodwill or other thrift store.
• Acrylic Paint, and painting tools (brushes, water, etc)
• Permanent marker
• I used an iPad to trace from, but you could also have a printed picture, or just draw without tracing.

Remove any pictures and backing from your frame. Clean the glass and tap the corners to prevent cuts.

I found a few butterfly images I liked. Because I wanted these to be somewhat accurate to life, I looked up the size of each butterfly I found and sized it to be roughly the same on my tablet. If you are using a tablet like this, I recommend setting it to stay on indefinitely for this project. The Nutter Butters are optional but recommended.

Place the glass over the top of the tablet (or whatever you are tracing). You want to work on what will be the backside of the image.

Trace all the black lines and outlines with a permanent marker. Looking back I think I could have done this directly with paint, but that's up to you.

I colored in any areas that I wanted to be all black. Then I went back and painted these black to make them even more opaque. Again, I think it would have worked just as well to skip the permanent marker and just use paint.

Still working on the back of the image, you will paint colors over the lines. You want this to be as saturated and opaque as possible.

Once everything is painted, you'll want to clean it again.

I made the mistake of tilting the painting while it was still wet. You can see in the first image the drips this caused. If that happens, just wipe it away carefully with a paper towel while it's still wet and repaint any parts you need to.

Let fully dry.

Clean the front and back again with glass cleaner.

Put the glass back in the frame. You can put a backing behind it, but I like leaving the glass clear. This will let it cast a shadow on the wall behind it and help make it look more real.

Hang or lean on the wall.

Bonus points if you can get a very cute cat to pose in front of it.