February Flower Drawing Challenge

February Flower Drawing Fun!

If you read my previous post you probably have a good idea of what I was doing during the month of February. I found myself sitting on the couch an awful lot as movement was quite painful and challenging, especially for that first post-operation week.

But, I had come into this healing extravaganza much prepared and planned on creating a drawing challenge for myself for the month of February. If I could not sit easily at my art table (major abdominal healing going on!) I could at least lean back into our new comfy couch and draw! I’m so glad I did! There was some serious cabin fever happening early on for me but this challenge helped me focus on something other than my sedentaryness.

Making a list

I chose to draw one flower each day for the month on just one sheet of paper. In the end I would have a drawing of a bouquet of flowers. In order to keep myself from scrambling to decide on which flower to draw, I created a list where each day I drew a flower whose name began with a letter of the alphabet. This gave me two extra days as there are twenty-six in the alphabet but twenty-eight days in February. So I used the first day of the month for planning the list and the last day of the month for finishing up if I had gotten a bit behind or wanted to add any little details.

Posting daily drawings

I shared each drawing daily on my Instagram account and in my Facebook group and also posted a work-in-progress as the piece came together. You can view all of my daily drawings by visiting the links. 😉

Flower trivia

I also included in each post interesting information about each flower and learned a lot myself! Here is an example of one:

Eep! It’s finished! Yarrow is the last flower for this fabulously fun #febflowers2018 and #febnaturedrawchallenge !

Thank you to those few of you who joined along with me for this very first of February challenges! I loved seeing how we each interpreted our flowers! I hope to create a challenge again next year.

Yarrow, or Achillea millefollium, is a flowering plant of the Asteracaea family, meaning it’s the same family as asters, daisies, and sunflowers! Yarrow can be found in temperate regions of North America, Asia, and Europe. It has also been introduced to Australia and New Zealand as feed for livestock.

I love love love Yarrow!! I know I’ve said this about a lot of the flowers for this challenge and it’s so true!! Flowers are just amazing in so many ways.

Yarrow is amazing! It has been planted to combat soil erosion due to its drought resistance, deep roots and leaves rich in minerals. It can be used as a companion plant to repel some insects and attract others such as ladybugs. Yarrow essential oil contains a chemical that kills the larvae of the tiger/forest mosquito of Asia.

The genus name Achillea is believed to derive from the Greek hero Achilles who carried yarrow with him on the battlefield. Chiron, the centaur, taught him to grow it on the battle grounds of Troy. Yarrow’s leaves are known to help stop bleeding. I grind dried yarrow into a powder to put on bleeding cuts. I also use dried yarrow flowers and leaves as an ingredient in a salve to help with skin scrapes, burns, cuts, and dryness. It’s amazing and has so many other uses!!

Tomorrow I will post my final finished piece of all of my twenty-six flowers!! So excited and so thrilled to have created and completed this challenge!! I will be offering prints in the near future too so keep an  out!!

Fitting them all in

There were challenges involved in placing each flower into the drawing knowing that I had to have room on this 9×12 sheet of paper for twenty-six different flowers! With more than twenty-six flowers (I drew two or more of some flower species) I had some serious planning to do.

But in the end it all came together with some forethought of where certain flowers would be placed. Leaving some flowers a little unfinished in order to overlap a future flower on top certainly helped making this piece cohesive. You can see in the image below that I left a bit of the lower left petal of the foxglove open so that I could draw part of another ‘overtop’.

Inking details

The Zinnia drawing and Wax flowers posted below are a couple of my favourites. I love drawing detail, can you tell?! So often I would post my current flower drawing and say that ‘this is my favourite flower’! Ha! I guess I love all flowers!!

I drew each flower with pencil first and then used various thicknesses of PITT pens (love!) to go over the pencil marks. All of the details were then added with my wonderful and trusty Staedtler 0.05 Pigment Liner pen. Yep. All of those little lines and dots in this zinnia were with that 0.05 liner. It is so very, very sweet.

I am quite pleased with the end result and so very happy that many of you love this piece too! Thank you!! xxx

Prints!

I have had requests for prints of my February Flowers and am happy to say I will have those available in my shop in the near future so keep an eye out for that announcement! If you subscribe to my newsletter you will be the first to hear of the update. There will only be a limited number available!

Next February I think I am going to draw mycelium! How wonderful will that be?! Mushroom happiness!

Happy creating!

Moongirl xx

 

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