The Butterfly Kachina is a herald to spring and symbolizes fertility, rebirth, beauty, freedom and nature itself. Since the butterfly lands and pollinates flowers used by Medicine Men, she is also a symbol of healing.
The headdress on the Butterfly Kachina is elaborate and left me scratching my head about the best way to design this. In Native American masks the Butterfly Kachina headdress is open, but there was no way to make an open design so I put the different design elements on a white background. The first thing I did was create the cane that you see pictured on the headdress. It is a step cane with a red center, yellow/orange and turquoise blue sides, and a long striped black and white border between the sections. It is slightly reduced on the inner headdress layer (and I'll probably make it even smaller in future masks) and stretched longer on the bottom edge. The outside edge and divisions are lined with black. The inner layer and bottom edge are raised up by one layer of clay (about 1/8") to give the design depth and then the face was layered on top. Finally I placed feathers from my Sunface Kachina and my Blue/Gray Owl Cane in between the layers. I completed this design before attaching to my tile based and curing, but in the future it would be easier to do this in multiple curing steps - sanding in between layers.
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