Symmetrical Butterflies

Symmetry is all around us... but one of the most beautiful examples of symmetry that occurs naturally in nature is you guessed it... the BUTTERFLY!

But it's not enough to give my kiddies this one example... in true Arty Pants (Art + Smarty Pants) style we took a look at the educational video below that quickly gives the basics of symmetry and puts our art class for the day into perspective!

To emphasize the symmetry in this beautiful creature we folded our pages in half, opened them again and drew half a butterfly in black oil pastel. I told them to press really hard cause we were going to need it to print on the other side of the page!

So the next step of course was to fold the paper back in half and rub so the image was pressed onto the opposite side of the page. Then they traced the print over to complete the picture and then painted them using pan watercolours. For the final flourish we painted the background in liquid watercolours and sprinkled some salt while it was still wet to get a mottled effect. (A bit of science in art... the salt sucks up the water in the watercolour leaving it looking speckled!)

Simply beautiful :)