Winging It Creatively
The template butterfly is finished. You only need to modify the basic shape and add decorative features to create numerous types of butterflies. Because the template is simple, it's easy to modify. Next, we'll take you through the process we used to generate our three butterflies.

To begin, duplicate the template butterfly. The first thing you want to do is establish the wing shape of your new butterfly. The easiest way to adjust the wing and veins simultaneously is with the Free Transform tool. This tool allows you to bend and skew the wing into different shapes for each type of butterfly.

To try it out, select the entire wing and then select the Free Transform tool. Click on the corner of the bounding box and you'll see the Scale arrow. Begin dragging and then press the command key (Ctrl in Windows). The pointer changes and you'll be able to distort just that corner of the wing, as shown in Figure E. Tweak the shape of the wing until you get something that looks good to you.

Figure E: The Free Transform tool can help you distort the wings into different shapes.

Getting Your Fill
Now that you've changed the wing shape, you only need to change the colors in order to have a whole new butterfly. You can also add or delete veins or just change how they connect together. The veins also give you a great way to add localized color and gradients quickly.

To do this, lock the veins layer to use it as a tracing aid. Then, create a new layer underneath the veins layer and name it gradient fills. Select the Pen tool and click points around a vein section, as shown in Figure F. Once you have a closed path, give it a gradient fill. After you do this once, the gradient fill becomes the default. So, you can quickly add other filled shapes around the wing and the veins cover up the gradient edges. You can also add spots and blends. Butterflies have vastly different appearances, so you can pretty much do anything you want to the wing. Once you've finished, copy and paste a copy of the wing onto a new layer, flip it horizontally and position it under the body layer. Then, you'll have a complete butterfly like ours in Figure G.

Figure F: By locking the veins layer, you can use it as a quick way to position gradients underneath it.

Figure G: A few color changes and details give us a very different butterfly.

In Clip
Whether you're creating graphics for logos, illustrations or brushes, you may find that even ugly clip art can be useful. These techniques aren't just for butterflies, but for any graphics where you need to create a variety of similar (yet different) objects without investing a lot of time.