Introducing February Flowers 2024

Doing the annual hashtag challenge—my way.

Indian blanketflower (Gaillardia pulchella) with checkered white butterfly (Pontia protodice). Blanketflower is a great choice for waterwise gardens! Native pollinators like the checkered white are going to be a recurring theme for my take on this year’s February Flowers challenge. Checkered whites usually lay their eggs on Brassica family plants, but the adults enjoy Asteraceae family nectar!

After a lot of thought and deliberation, I’ve decided to participate in the Instagram #29februaryflowers2024 creative challenge (also called #februaryflowers2024).

Despite the fact that it would seem to be right up my alley (flowers! painting!), I was pretty hesitant about whether I should join in. Would taking part align with my own creative goals for the year? Would it just cause a lot of stress and anxiety about not keeping up and being unable to draw or paint rapidly enough to complete an attractive image every single day for 29 days? Finally, I seem to have a severe allergy to externally imposed prompts, and anyway, a list of flowers that includes gladioli and hyacinths isn’t very “New Mexico Wildflowers”, now is it?

To complete the February Flowers creative challenge, on odd-numbered days I’ll post wildflower photos from my archive. On even-numbered days, I’ll post either (the slooooww) progress on my current colored-pencil WIP, or an image from an adorable little sketchbook I purchased last summer. At roughly 6” x 9” and just 16 spreads, it should be quite manageable to fill its petite real estate within the month. And I’ve been giving myself a bit of a head start. What will I fill it with? Not totally sure just yet, but color grids, houseplant portraits and contour drawings of seed pods (former flowers!) are sure to be in the mix.

I bought this little cutie from Vintage Paper Co. last summer, and have been wanting the perfect reason to fill it ever since!

For readers here on Substack, I’ll post a weekly summary during the challenge with all the images of the week, with brief notes about each, and some thoughts about how the experiment is going so far. That way, you can enjoy colorful flowers in dull, gray February, without getting the horrible sensation that someone is catapulting email-bombs into your inbox every single day. If you’d like to follow me on Instagram during the challenge, my IG handle is @newmexicowildflowers.

To answer the first question last, how does this align with my creative goals for this year? February is still deep winter here in northern New Mexico. Skiing, not botanizing, is the most appropriate outdoor activity. Given my slow and methodical work process and limited studio time, won’t devoting energy to creating quick and clever illustrations of traditional garden flowers throw me off track for completing the images I really want to make this year? My hope is that by posting old photos of flowers I can discover some new and interesting facts about them to share. And of course, I’ve had a longstanding goal of filling a sketchbook with a thematically consistent series of considered renderings. (What? Doesn’t everybody want to do that? 🤓) The question remains, though: Can I follow a monthlong creative challenge without flaking out due to anxious overwhelm?

Follow along to find out! 😉