Butterfly Moving On to a New Home

 

My "Fruits and Flowers" butterfly has ended it's time at the Morris Arboretum exhibition. It has been donated to Community Partnership School where I work as an art teacher. Students from this school helped me decorate the center body of the butterfly with their drawings of seeded fruits. Below are some photos of the butterfly as it was installed at Morris and also the students who I took on a field trip to see it installed. 

This was such a wonderful experience. I am incredibly grateful to have been a part of it. 

Butterflies in Exlibris by Kosa Balint

The temperature drops, and the butterfly on the green can no longer flap its wings. It sits on a flower, motionless, reliant on the patterns and colors of its wings to ward predators off. Most likely no one will notice its presence.

The temperature rises, and the insect flutters, popping off the floral field, demanding all of our attention, like Mrs. Monet's red kerchief.

More exquisite exlibris by Kosa Balint can be found archived here.

In My Yard: "Cabbage White"

Woodcut
Black ink with hand coloring with watercolors
3" x 4" (image)
For sale here. 

This is the seventh in a series for a single sheet handmade book called In My Yard. This book will be submitted to the exhibition Ritual taking place in December in Philadelphia. 

Nobody seems to get all that excited about these butterflies, I suppose because they are everywhere (at least in Philadelphia) and just plain white. But they are lovely, especially when they land on a brightly-colored flower that sets off their delicate, white wings. 

"Painted Lady Butterfly" (color)

Here's the hand-colored version of yesterday's print. Every time I do a black and white print and then hand color it I feel like it would be better if it was a color print with no or hardly any pure black in it. Something about it feels flat and kind of dirty. Right now I'm also working on a little 6 color reduction of a millipede. Will post that tomorrow.

"Painted Lady Butterfly"

This whole school year I'll be teaching woodcut printmaking to middle schoolers in Philadelphia through the Wagner Free Institute for Science's SNAP after school program. Specifically, the kids will be making small woodcuts of insects.

In preparation, I made this little 4x4 inch woodcut of one of the painted lady butterflies that keeps hanging out in my front yard. I picked the image, drew it on the block, carved it, and printed it in an edition of 4 all in the span of 2 hours today. I did this just to see how fast I could do it, because if I can't do it in a couple hours, the kids won't be able to do it in the total 5 hours they'll have allotted to them.

I am reminded of some wise words from a fellow teaching artist who worked with me at the Mural Arts Program. He said that if we were asking the kids to do something creative that might take us a long time, the kids would do it in 2 minutes. But that if it was something technical that took us 5 minutes it would take the kids at least a half hour. The more creative part of this that would have normally taken me a long time is the thinking through the image itself and then drawing it. So instead I just cropped a section of a photograph I took and copied it onto the block, which took about half an hour. The kids will have an hour for that part. The actual carving and printing (the technical part) took about an hour and a half, so it might be pushing it to expect the kids to be able to do that part in just 4 hours, but if I keep them focused and help the more meticulous students, I think we can pull it off.