3D Vintage Butterfly Art

 This sweet 3D butterfly art is simple to do, but will leave a lasting impression on your home decor! You can also find the video tutorial here on my YouTube channel:
https://youtube.com/@AngelNichole

I grabbed this oval frame from the thrift store, though you could do this project with any frame you may already have. I got lucky to find this one because oval frames are scarce in my thrift stores.

my luck continued as I took this frame apart because it turned out that it already had a wood backing. If your frame doesn’t have a wood backing, that’s ok. You can make one with thin wood or pressed cardboard. You could also use the glass in the frame as the backing (you may just have to add a few more coats of paint to cover the glass in the next step.)

I put my frame back together with the wood backing and painted the entire thing with a couple coats of Waverly Chalk paint in the color “Plaster”. I think any spring color will look amazing for this project.

Now for the 3D part! I have this small butterfly mould that I got from Amazon. So I grabbed some air dry clay and started making several little clay butterflies to adorn my frame and backing. I used Sculpey air dry clay, but I’m also a fan of Das which can be purchased on Amazon. (Sculpey can be purchased at Walmart).

Once I had a whole bunch of my clay butterflies made, I let them dry for about an hour. It’s really important to note here that you don’t want the clay to completely dry. Just keep checking them because if they dry completely, you won’t be able to mold the wings upward. On the other hand, if you try to add and mold these too soon, the wings will just fall down and won’t hold.

After letting them stiffen a bit, I used some Gorilla Glue gel superglue and started gluing my butterflies to the frame and backing in an upward diagonal direction. I added a few onto the frame itself so that it looked like the butterflies were coming out of the frame.

You can see in the photo that I glued some flat and others I used glue on the bodies, but pushed the wings upward to make them look like they were flying. Once the clay was completely dry (after about 24 hours), I used that same plaster color paint and a small brush to gently paint the butterflies the same color as the frame.

And here's the final result!