How to Draw and Paint a Butterfly For Beginners

Ever wondered how to draw and paint a butterfly that’s easy enough for beginners and beautiful?

Then this step by step tutorial will show you the way.

This tutorial is suitable for complete beginners in drawing and painting and is an easy painting idea for kids, teens and adults alike. Full YouTube tutorial link below.

If you’re loving painting butterflies, and looking for more fluttering inspo then check out this abstract butterfly painting.

No time to go through the whole tutorial now? Save to your Pinterest for later here.

How To Draw

Check out this how to draw a butterfly tutorial for more detailed steps on how to draw it on your canvas or paper.

Best Paint Colors For a Monarch Butterfly

Monarch butterflies have a distinctive sectioned pattern on their wings. Those sections are colored with a vibrant orange and are bordered with black. Finally, the wing borders are detailed with white spots around the border.

Any black, white, orange acrylic paint you can get your hands on is going to work.

In terms of the orange, if you’re looking to find or mix a really vibrant orange paint, then I’m going to share some nifty paint mixing tips with you.

For the most vibrant orange you can use cadmium orange, because I found it’s the most saturated and warm oranges I’ve come across. If you don’t have cadmium orange then you can mix a similar tone using any cadmium red with any cadmium yellow (see picture below).

If your brand of paint doesn’t have cadmium red and yellow try finding a the warmest red and yellow hue you can find . Avoid reds and yellows that have blue undertones, like alizarin crimson and lemon yellow, because they will make a dull orange.

I did a mix of 4/5 parts cadmium red to 1 part cadmium yellow. You can adjust the ratio to get the vibrancy of orange you like best.

How To Paint a Monarch Butterfly (overview)

After you’ve drawn your butterfly and filled in the pink background (see full tutorial below), the easiest way to paint in your monarch butterfly is to first paint in the orange/yellow sections in the butterflies wings.

This way you don’t have to worry about painting inside the lines, as we are going to go over it with a black border at the end.

Using a medium round brush (size 8) paint in the yellow and orange sections on the wings of the butterfly.

Paint 2 coats of the orange and yellow to make the butterfly wings look more opaque and vibrant.

TIP: Yellow and orange can be a bit transparent on canvas, and need multiple coats to make it look vibrant and opaque.

Once you’ve filled in the sections then fill in the border with black paint. Essential everywhere we filled in with the pencil in the drawing step. Switch to a smaller round brush (size 6) if it makes it easier to get the thinner lines.

Then you’ll fill in the body of the butterfly with black, grey and white highlights (see full tutorial for the details instructions)

Finally you’ll add some detailed white spots along the border of the butterflies wings (using size 6 brush and titanium white paint)

I hope you enjoyed learning how to draw and paint a butterfly. For the full step by step painting tutorial please see the end of this post.

Finished Butterfly Painting Pictures

Butterfly Painting Ideas

This butterfly drawing and painting step by step process can be used to paint butterflies on many beginner projects and surfaces like:

• canvas
• paper
• face painting (with face paints)
• rocks
• wood
• walls
• mirror/glass
• water bottles (see below)
• and more…

You can also customize the color of the wings by simply painting in the sections in a color of your choice instead of the orange (see pic below of my blue morpho butterflies)

My summer goals this year is to paint a monarch butterfly on a nice big rock. I’ll update this post with pictures once it’s done! Here’s a good tutorial for all you rock painters out there, how to paint a butterfly on a rock.

Last summer I painted blue morpho butterflies on my hydroflask water bottle, because I’m a bit butterfly obsessed! You can check out my entire post on how to paint on your hydroflask.

One piece of advice: When painting on rocks, water bottles or any small surface you’ll want to use smaller round brushes to make the small details and shapes.

How to Paint a Butterfly Step By Step

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