May Flowers Recap

Examples of my 30 days of May -"May Flower Painting Challenge"

See all 30 paintings on my DailyPaintworks.com Gallery

May has always been my favorite month of the year, but last April I had a serious accident and was temporarily in a wheelchair and spent the entire month of May on my couch, feeling sad that I had missed out on all the wonderful spring flowers. This year, I decided I would paint flowers everyday during May and I added another layer to the challenge requiring that they would all be from life- not photo's. 

I made up this challenge for myself as motivation to be surrounded by beauty and joy each day and be immersed in painting for the whole month. I used flowers from my own garden, flowers bought at a florist, on a couple of days just used my imagination. I generally set up the flowers in a vase or with some still life props or some days did close ups of a single flower. The only time I used a photo reference was for a bridal bouquet commission. The paintings generally have been 8 x 10 or smaller with a couple of larger exceptions that took more than a day to complete.

The challenge has stretched me to think of new ideas and new approaches each day. I think the discipline of painting from life everyday rather than relying on photos added to my learning.

Needless to say, May 2018 has been a lot more fun than last May was. It was definitely a big time commitment to paint every single day. I've done 30 day painting challenges before that were organized by some other people, but this one was more taxing and time consuming since it required finding and setting up the subjects rather that painting from photo references

If you'd like to see the all the paintings they are on my dailypaintworks gallery .  See which one is your favorite. Some are already on the way to their new owners, but others are still available if you'd like to have one for your own or as a gift for someone special. 

Each one was also posted individually on this blog when they were painted each day during the month of May so you can see the archives for more. Several posts show steps and reference photos if that would be of interest.

Thanks for following along!