3D Printed and Alcohol Inked Butterflies

I had so much fun printing the articulated t-rex and dragon, that I went looking for more articulated prints and came across this pretty butterfly design. I immediately knew that I wanted to print it in white and try to decorate it with alcohol ink.

We have an Ender 3 v. 2 printer which works great for small prints like this butterfly. I followed the recommended settings and set it to .2 resolution and 15% infil in the slicer. The design post also recommends rectilinear or lines type infil. For those of you new to printing, that just means that the layers are printed in lines across the design instead of a specific pattern. I prepped our print bed with a little bit of hairspray to help with adhesion to the print bed.

I printed it with white PLA so I could easily decorate it with alcohol ink. The print ended up taking about 3 hours and came out great.

I liked the first butterfly so well that I ended up making a second one with the same settings.

After I had two printed butterflies, I laid out a craft mat and got out my alcohol inks. I cleaned up the hairspray residue on the butterflies with a bit of rubbing alcohol and a rinse under the faucet.

I decided I wanted to decorate one of the butterflies using plastic wrap. Plastic wrap application is one of the easiest ways to apply alcohol ink to surfaces, and it works really well on surfaces that are mostly smooth but just a bit porous--I figured the PLA would be perfect for it. I laid down a piece of regular plastic cling wrap to my craft mat (and did not smooth it down--some wrinkles are good for this) and covered it in a rainbow of alcohol ink that I just dripped right on the surface until an area large enough to wrap around the butterfly was covered.

Then I placed the butterfly onto the plastic wrap and folded the inked plastic wrap around the butterfly. A couple of little areas were showing up white through the plastic wrap so I wiggled the ink around a bit with my finger and then set the whole thing aside to dry.

While the plastic wrap butterfly was drying, I decorated the other butterfly with blown ink. I used a can of air to blow the ink around the surface. I started out with some sailboat blue ink and filled in roughly the same area on each side of the butterfly (since butterfly wings are symmetrical).

I added some purple and green inks and blew them around with the canned air.

About the time that I was adding some magenta, I realized the ink was pooling under the butterfly (not surprisingly since it is a hinged butterfly. So I carefully picked it up and placed it on top of a folded over piece of paper towel to help with the excess ink.

I kept adding ink to the butterfly and blowing it around with the canned air until the surface was covered with a rainbow of colors. Then I used a small paintbrush to paint pitch black ink onto the body and antennae. Then I let it dry.

Once the butterfly had dried enough for me to feel comfortable handling it (about an hour), I sprayed a couple of layers of Kamar Varnish on the ink to keep it from bleeding or reacting if it comes in contact with any alcohol based liquids.

I came back to the plastic wrap butterfly after a weekend away. You can usually unwrap it after leaving it overnight, but it will need to stay wrapped until ink is completely dry (12+ hours) to achieve a pattern.

The smoother side (the side of the butterfly that was on the print bed) came out pretty good--the ink mixed a bit brownish in places, but had good coverage and some neat patterning.

The rougher backside still inked, but not as nicely. I sealed this butterfly with some Kamar Varnish and ended up with two really cute butterflies.

I think the blown ink butterfly was a bit more successful just because the inks came out so nice and bright on it. But that plastic wrap creasing reads very butterfly wing-ish. The right wing looks kinda monarch-y. I might need to try the plastic wrap method again and see if I can achieve a more butterfly-like color and pattern!