Whistlegraph Butterfly — Formal Form Specification #

A formal English description of the four-stroke "Butterfly Cosplayer" emblem, derived from the canonical graphic score system/public/assets/whistlegraph/butterfly-cosplayer/butterfly-cosplayer-score.png (composed by Jeffrey Alan Scudder, December 29, 2019).

This spec exists so image-generation prompts can describe the butterfly precisely without needing the score image as a reference, and so any rendering pipeline can verify a generated butterfly against a written form.

1. Overall Gestalt #

A small four-petal-wing butterfly, drawn as a single contiguous outline (no fill), in a plain dark ballpoint or felt-tip line on cream paper. Reads at a glance like a child's hand-drawn marker doodle of a butterfly: charmingly imperfect, NOT geometric, NOT symmetric to ruler precision, NOT painterly.

The butterfly is front-on (wings spread flat to the viewer), vertically centered around its body axis, and slightly taller than wide (approx. 1.0 wide × 1.1 tall, roughly square but with a hint of vertical reach from the antennae).

It carries NO color, NO fill, NO shading, NO ornament in its emblem form — only the closed black outline and (optionally) a small body-line and antennae.

2. The Four Strokes (Wings) #

The wing structure is a four-petal-cloverleaf rendered as four overlapping rounded lobes, NOT four separate ovals. Each lobe is a soft humped arc that loops back into the next lobe through the body. Reading clockwise from the upper-left:

Upper-left wing. A rounded petal-like lobe that begins at the body, swells out and up to the upper-left, peaks, and curves back down to the body. The peak is at roughly the 10–11 o'clock position. Top edge slightly higher than the upper-right peak (asymmetry intentional — it's hand-drawn).
Upper-right wing. Mirror of stroke 1 toward the upper-right, peaking at roughly 1–2 o'clock. Top edge slightly lower than stroke 1's peak.
Lower-right wing. A rounded petal-like lobe to the lower-right, peaking at roughly 4–5 o'clock. Slightly smaller and rounder than the upper wings — like the hindwings on a swallowtail without the tails.
Lower-left wing. Mirror of stroke 3 to the lower-left, peaking at roughly 7–8 o'clock.

Each lobe is a single confident curve (not a stack of strokes). The four lobes meet at a central pinch where the body sits — a small hourglass-narrow waist where opposing wing pairs touch each other.

The upper wings are slightly larger and rounder than the lower wings. The whole wing assembly resembles a four-leaf clover more than a real butterfly's wing geometry.

3. Body and Head #

A small vertical body line runs along the central axis from the bottom of the wing assembly to just above the upper wing tips. Two parts:

Thorax/abdomen. A short vertical rectangle (slightly taller than wide), sitting in the center of the four-wing pinch. Sides are roughly straight, top and bottom are gently curved.
Head. A tiny circular or dot-like nub at the top of the body, just above the wing pinch.

The body is drawn with the same line weight as the wings — no thickening, no fill.

4. Antennae #

Two single-stroke antennae rise from the head, one to the upper-left and one to the upper-right. Each antenna is:

A thin curved line (no thickening),
Roughly the height of the wing assembly itself (long — they reach above the wings),
Curving outward away from the central axis like a soft "C" or a pair of opposing question-mark hooks,
Ending in a tiny ball/dot at the tip (the antenna club).

The antennae are NOT straight, NOT branched, NOT feathery — just two confident curving strokes with a dot at each tip.

5. Line Quality #

Single confident line. The whole butterfly reads as drawn in ONE sitting, with the line varying only slightly in thickness from natural pen pressure.
Slight imperfection. Curves are not mathematically smooth; lobes are not identical; the symmetry is approximate, NOT mirror-perfect.
No hatching, no fill, no cross-contour, no shading. Pure outline.
Color. Plain dark ink (black or near-black) on cream paper. When used as an inscribed emblem on a colored object (e.g. on the back of a chartreuse laptop lid), the line stays dark against the surface, NOT recolored.

6. Scale and Placement (when used as a lid emblem) #

When the butterfly appears in place of a manufacturer's logo on the back of jeffrey's chartreuse-green MacBook Neo lid:

Centered on the lid, both horizontally and vertically,
Occupies roughly the central 35–40% of the lid's height,
Drawn at the same line weight as a permanent-marker inscription (~2–3px equivalent at the rendered scale),
Sits ON the chartreuse surface, NOT cut out of it (the green of the lid shows through any open shape; the butterfly is a black line drawing, not a backlit cutout).

7. What it must NOT look like #

NOT a realistic butterfly silhouette (no scalloped wing edges, no eye-spots, no veins),
NOT a corporate butterfly logo (no gradients, no geometric mirror-symmetry, no bevels),
NOT a silhouette/fill (the wings are open outlines, the cream/chartreuse background shows through),
NOT a single stroke with a flat plane (the four lobes are clearly four humps, not one ellipse),
NOT an emoji-style butterfly (no tilted 3/4 perspective, no decorative dots inside wings),
NOT a Monarch / Swallowtail with tails or pointed wings — the lobes are ROUND.

8. Compact prompt fragment #

For inclusion verbatim in image-generation prompts:

The butterfly emblem is a small hand-drawn FOUR-STROKE WHISTLEGRAPH BUTTERFLY in confident dark ink: four rounded petal-like wing-lobes meeting at a central pinched waist (a four-leaf-clover gestalt — two slightly larger upper lobes peaking near 10–11 and 1–2 o'clock, two slightly smaller lower lobes peaking near 4–5 and 7–8 o'clock), a short rectangular thorax-and-abdomen body sitting in the central pinch with a small dot for a head above, and TWO long curving single-stroke antennae rising up-and-outward from the head and ending in tiny ball-dots. Pure outline only — no fill, no shading, no color, no veins, no eye-spots. A child's confident felt-tip butterfly, charmingly asymmetric, NOT a corporate logo, NOT a realistic Monarch, NOT a silhouette.