After drying the perfect breed specimens and having delicately taken the 4 wings from the body...
I place the wings side by side on the work table.
I gently mix the resin, the hardener and the white pigment so not to make air bubbles in the mix.
I take toothpicks, dip one tip in the mix and place them one by one on the wings.
Be careful not to glue to the work table.
I build a wooden frame for a BBQ motor and glued a styrofoam cylinder to the rood.
I solidly place the toothpicks holding the wings one by one on the styrofoam cylinder.
I add a touch of resin to solidify the wing to the toothpick.
When the resin has dried, I add another coat on part of one side of the wing and let it dry again.
Then I add more resin coats that I let dry for 12 hours as the motor turns to prevent accumulations and drops on the wing tips. Still I must check for drops and accumulations between coats as they dry, because they certainly jeopardize the results.
When the wings are completely white on both sides...
and that the resin is evenly distributed...
dried and thickened...
I add a coat of contact cement and let dry and add another coat of contact cement.
When dry enough...
I pull the toothpicks from the styrofoam cylinder.
I twist the wings that split open in the middle into two wing prints, front and back, that hold the butterfly's colors (scales)...
while the wing itself is now transparent like a fly wing, breaks and falls from the resin wing prints.
The color of the butterfly is on the print of the resin.
I take the front print and the back print and stick them perfectly back to back on the contact cement to reconstruct the wing.
I call this operation the triple-transfer.
First transfer - the wing scales transfer from the chetin wing to the resin.
Second transfer - sticking the front forewing print or hindwing print to the back forewing or hindwing print, back to back (with the contact cement)...
transfers the scales from the inside of the resin to the outside of the resin.
Third transfer > in this manner the wings on the right of the butterfly become the wings on the left of the butterfly and the wings on the left of the butterfly become the wings on the right of the butterfly.
And that is the triple-transfer.
The wings are then bagged two by two or four by four till they are fixed into a necklace, earrings or a pendant.
Thank you for your interest and please suggest to your friends a visit to be of the fisrt to know about this new way of doing 'butterfly wing art'