Weekly Art Practice - Week 31

This week’s practice is another vague and ambitious theme; flowers. Vague because there are so many different kinds of flowers and ambitious because I often feel like I only know 5 flowers. But I see flowers constantly as they are probably the most common tattoo theme and I follow a lot of tattoo artists on Instagram. But I myself rarely draw them. So I thought it would be good to practice since they are such a common theme in art.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination

Not a terrible day one?

Day 2 - Figure sketching

When researching flowers it was a bit of a case of “I want to draw that one and that one and that one etc.”. There are a lot of interesting shapes out there so it was hard to choose to focus on a select few to get good at those or to keep trying new ones to try to internalise more ways flowers can look.

Day 3 - Reference studies

Easily could have spent hours doing reference studies as I found these to be pretty relaxing. Sunflowers came up a lot in my search results so that and roses are probably the real theme of this week.

Day 4 - Style studies

Is there a more drawn subject than flowers? (okay probably human bodies due to everyone’s efforts to do figure drawing practice). I probably could have scrolled Pinterest for hours for reference images but I knew it was a trap and grabbed the first few slightly different looking ones I found.

I worked on a few of these on the train and I felt the rocky, unsteadiness of the train added a nice jitter to my line work that made the petals look more organic.

Reference: Pantone flowers by ??? I’m absolutely shocked that Google research image search had nothing for these. I even chose it because I felt certain I had seen these images on Twitter in the past. But the only thing I could find was links to Russian websites selling the art on merch?? Pinterest pin

Reference: Sunflowers by Libby Frame

Reference: Hydrangeas by what seems to be an art resources from Jeforel?? and HowJoyful.

Day 5 - Drawing from imagination

I chose the 3 flowers first for day 5 and then went from there. Mixing a bit of the stylistic flowers with general memory.

Conclusion

After 2 weeks of flowers I do kind of wish I had chosen one flower type to focus on. Hydrangeas were lots of fun but drawing so many little flowers was definitely time consuming.

Been thinking a lot about how I want my art practice to change in 2025 which has led to thinking a lot about master studies. I’ve been watching videos of other people doing master studies and they always look like, like trying to solve a mystery or a puzzle. But they do also look rather intense so I’m not sure what’s a realistic goal for doing studies. 1 a week? 1 a month?

But I’d also like to start working on pieces I’m comfortable sharing as even though I’ve been drawing consistently all year, none of my weekly practice pieces are finished pieces. And while studies are important they aren’t really, fully “yours”. So I also want to find a way to work on new personal art more. Still have a few months to figure it all out.

Pinterest board of flowers.