Blue Butterflies Celtic Medieval Art

16/2/2021

Inspired by Celtic knotwork and Medieval manuscripts - my 'Blue Butterflies' Celtic Medieval artwork...

'Blue Butterflies' Celtic Medieval artwork by Lotti Brown

If you've taken my Essential Drawing Skills course, you'll know that I'm very inspired by Medieval artwork and Medieval manuscripts, as well as Celtic knotwork...

Now that I feel a little more practised with my Celtic knotwork, I thought I'd see if I could also bring in more of a feel of a medieval manuscript - I love the way that tiny paintings of flowers, butterflies, birds, animals and even people decorate the edges of the manuscript pages, and I thought I'd like to bring something of that to this artwork.

I'm also drawing on my recent Celtic art style butterfly and flower artworks - I wanted to keep drawing butterflies as I've loved drawing them so much.

I started out with the Celtic knotwork - carefully planning out a design...

Careful planning as I create my Celtic knotwork design

I then trace the design and use a pen to draw it out...

Celtic knotwork design drawn out

I next add colour - here I used coloured pencils for a change...

Adding colour to my Celtic knotwork drawing

My next drawing is my butterfly - this is a pretty Common Blue butterfly, a butterfly I used to see a lot as a child in South Wales...

Common Blue butterfly drawing

And I added a few little florals to work into the knotwork somewhere...

Drawing some little flowers

I then scanned all my drawings into the computer, and imported them into the Adobe Illustrator programme which transforms them into a vectorised or digitised format so that I can work with them on screen...

Drawings all scanned in and imported into Adobe Illustrator

First I work on the basic composition...

Working on the composition digitally

Then, I add the additional elements (the little flowers) and start tweaking the colours, just to play around and see what has the most impact...

Adding flower drawings and tweaking colours digitally

At this point, I wasn't entirely sure what was going to go in the middle - I thought I'd quite like to put some more lettering in, but I don't think they'd work inside the space, so I decided to put some more Celtic knotwork in the centre area, instead... I used four of these corner-pieces to create a cross-shape in the centre.

Celtic knotwork cornerpiece drawing

I simply added these extra elements into the digital artwork and decided to tweak colours again to work with the new idea...

Adding additional knotwork and tweaking colours

With additional knotwork added in the centre of the piece - then tweaking colours again

The completed artwork...

Blue Butterflies medieval manuscript Celtic knotwork artwork

Blue Butterflies medieval manuscript style Celtic knotwork artwork by Lotti Brown

I'm loving the Medieval or Renaissance type feel to the art, together with the Celtic knotwork and nature and botanical illustrations - I hope you love it, too!

Celtic Medieval Renaissance art print by Lotti Brown

Celtic Medieval Renaissance Butterflies art print

How to Buy

My Celtic Medieval Butterflies are available as cushions, T-shirts, mugs, phonecases, shower curtains, journals, notebooks, bags, clocks and much more in my Redbubble store here...

Worldwide delivery is available from manufacture-and-print centres in UK, Europe, USA, Canada & Australia and customs charges will be refunded if you're unlucky enough to be charged...

Buy my Celtic Medieval Blue Butterflies art here...

Buy Blue Butterflies prints & other goodies here

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