Butterfly Outlines and Silhouettes with Size Trios, Half Wings and Bridge Stencils

Craft templates come first in this butterfly outline set, ahead of single portraits. Besides ten single butterflies, there are wings cut in half for folding, trios of the same butterfly in three sizes, three wings filled with a floral stencil pattern and three small flocks. Each of the 20 designs is supplied as a solid black shape and as an outline drawing.

Ten single butterflies

Designs 01 to 05 face you with both wings spread. They differ in wing shape: a swallowtail with long trailing tails, a rounded wing, a narrow longwing, an angular wing with hooked tips and a scalloped wing with a wavy hem. Designs 06 to 08 turn to the side, gliding, climbing and lifting, so you see one raised wing pair, the body and the curled antennae. Designs 09 and 10 are half butterflies, a swallowtail and a rounded wing, each ending in a straight edge where the body would meet its mirror half.

Trios, stencils and flocks

The four size trios (11 to 14) line up a large, a medium and a small copy of the same butterfly, in swallowtail, rounded, angular and scalloped shapes. The size-pieces folder breaks each trio apart, so the large butterfly is about 3.5 inches wide, the medium about 2.2 inches and the small about 1.3 inches, sitting at those sizes on their own canvas. You can place them one at a time without separating the trio yourself.

Designs 15 to 17 are the bridge stencils. Rose vine fills the wings with open roses, buds and leaves. Iris scroll puts iris blooms in the forewings and small hanging bell flowers in the hindwings. Fern lace packs each wing with rows of leaflets. The last three designs are flocks of three, four and five butterflies drifting upward or along an arc.

Where the detail sits

In the outline files the wings are fully drawn: the cells of the wing, branching veins, a band of scallops along the margin and a segmented body. The guide calls these veins decorative, so treat them as artwork rather than a species chart. The solid files of the plain butterflies drop all of that and keep only the edge of the wing, the body and the antennae, which makes them the quick shape to trace or fill. The stencils work the other way round. Their solid version is the patterned one, with every rose, leaf and frond opened up in the black, while the outline version draws the same pattern in thin lines.

Each SVG is a single black filled path with no strokes, so changing the color in your software is one fill setting. Because the outline lines are filled shapes too, they scale with the drawing and get thinner when you shrink a butterfly.

Printing and cutting

The full-page PDFs print an open-wing butterfly about 6.8 inches across on US Letter. The four-up and six-up sheets repeat the same design at about 3.3 inches wide, which is handy for a set of matching cutouts. A small header with the design number and name sits at the top of every page, so use the SVG or PNG when you need the butterfly alone.

The guide doesn’t promise any physical cutting result and asks you to test a sample in your own material and settings first. Antennae and fine veins get very thin at small sizes, and the stencil designs need to be enlarged before cutting.

Questions

How do I use the half-wing designs?

Designs 09 and 10 are half a butterfly, one forewing and hindwing pair with a straight edge down the middle of the body. The guide describes them for tracing and fold-line projects, so you can set that straight edge on the fold of a folded sheet, cut around the wings and open it to a full, matching butterfly.

Are the butterflies in the flock designs joined together?

No. Design 18 has three butterflies, 19 has four and 20 has five, each a separate shape arranged as one composition. Select a single butterfly in your software if you want to move or resize it on its own.