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394 The Book of Indoor and Outdoor Games |
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a favourite amusement of the art-students in Paris. To each person is given a sheet of note paper and a palette-knife, paper-cutter or silver table-knife, and each should have access to about a dozen tubes of colour—King's yellow, Naples yellow, flake white, ivory black, Prussian blue, cobalt vermilion, Venetian green, Antwerp blue, cerulean blue, burnt umber—are some of the shades that are most successful in depicting the tones of the butterflies' wings.
The scrapings of a palette, or various dabs of paint squeezed from the tubes taken at random, are transferred to the sheets of paper—say about as much paint as would cover the surface of a silver quarter. The paint is applied on the inside of the paper, near the crease where it is folded and exactly in the centre.
The papers are then folded together, thus repeating the dabs of colour and various markings, of course, in exact duplicate. They are then held against the window-pane, which permits the paint being seen, and with a clean palette-knife or paper-cutter one presses upward and outward, starting at the left edge of the folded paper, thus spreading the paint in that direction to form the upper and larger wing and outward and downward to indicate the lower one. The folded papers show the butterflies in profile, but when opened a great variety of them with spread wings is revealed—some of them wonderfully beautiful, the haphazard designs far transcending anything that one would probably have thought out with intention. Some made up entirely of several shades of blue and others of different yellows in combination are especially attractive. Sometimes, if the quantity of paint used be a bit in excess of the requirement, the tiny scales on the wings are represented.
A body and antennae may then be added to each |
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