For the past few years, I’ve been doing the February Flowers challenge started by Amanda Evanston. This year, I wanted to make a cohesive collection and something in a style that felt like mine. Last year’s flowers all felt very different from each other, and it was a tremendous opportunity for me to stretch and try new things. I learned a little about what I like and what I don’t like, and what felt like mine and what didn’t.

For this year, I knew that I wanted to do flowers, and I had ideas about incorporating flowers with other things that I was thinking on, like water and boats, inspired by my recent shrimp boats (Instagram Link to Shrimp Boats Post). I wanted to do my best to follow the prompts, but knew that there would be some days I would be challenged. And I honestly don’t know how I got to the idea, but I landed on creating flowers inspired by pictures of friends and family. The idea was that if I had a picture of me and three friends, I would paint four flowers that resembled us in the picture, one flower for each of us. And that’s what I did for the whole month (for the most part). I really felt this collection, it made me SO happy to create, and I loved creating or sharing a story with each painting. And I named these paintings, which I’ve never done before.

And a few more of my faves: