Butterfly Specimen Picture

It's easy to make your own art for your walls, and specimen art is so simple to make to suit any colour scheme.

This is another "change things we already have to suit our new house décor" post. Catchy title eh! Previously I've shared changes to our bedroom things here and here. I've not wanted or needed to buy all new in our new home, some things can just be tweaked to feel like new. 

We had a couple of small pictures in the old bedroom that I had made quite a few years ago, both turquoise to match the wallpaper we had.

One was made from a lovely laser cut birthday card I had been given. It was just too pretty to not keep so I simply framed it in a box frame with a vibrant turquoise card behind.

The other was a simple specimen butterfly picture.

This was so easy (and cheap) to make using a butterfly punch and paint swatches.

I still really like both pieces but in our new bedroom there are no turquoise accents, we have a much more subtle colour pallet of just white, cream and gold so rather than get rid, I gave these two little pieces of art a do-over.

Did you see my post a few weeks ago about making drawer dividers to help get my dresser drawers organised? I mentioned I had wall paper samples left over from another project. This is that other project! I chose a gold and cream striped wallpaper and used the gold sparkly sections for both these projects. 

The laser cut one was super simple.

I took the back off the frame and the turquoise card was replaced by a piece of the gold wallpaper. The stripes of the wallpaper weren't quite wide enough so I joined two pieces, glueing them to the paper that came in the frame originally, then trimming them to size.

I then just reassembled the frame, so the laser cut is right up against the glass and the gold wallpaper layer is at the back.

For the specimen art picture I thought about using a different punch but I do really like the butterflies still. This time, instead of paint swatches I used cream card and a scrap of the gold sparkly wall paper.

I punched out 19 butterflies from the cream card and one from the sparkly wall paper and arranged them on a piece of good quality white paper. I didn't measure, I just lined them up by eye, but you could be precise and measure this all out if you want.

I folded the wings of the butterflies up a little, then carefully glued just the bodies to the paper. I just did them one at a time, so I didn't mess up the arrangement and spacing.

The sparkly paper is actually way more sparkly that showing up in these photos.

I have no idea if specimen art is still in fashion or not, I just know it is really easy to DIY and I like it! It needs zero artistic skills and can be made to suit any décor. It's worth getting a punch as it makes it so simple but at a push you could just cut shapes with a pair of scissors.

Julie

I'll be linking up this project at all these lovely link parties