For the last two weeks I've challenged myself to sketch every night before bed. Part of this challenge is forcing myself rebuild the artistic handwriting I've lost in hopes of getting back into painting, but the other part of it is stress relief. I am never more at peace than I am with art supplies in my hands.

I've tasked myself with drawing bouquets of flowers I find inspiring online (I know- more flowers) and it's been a wonderful escape. I find my mind drifting to old memories, children's books, and my favorite flower scenes in movies. There's a line in the movie Bed of Roses that lives in a special place in my heart. Christian Slater's character is a florist and he shares why he loves delivering flowers to strangers:

"I like to see peoples faces, when they are just falling in love, or making up from a fight, or even if they are just grieving. There's something beautiful about a persons face at that moment, and yours was incredible...confused..shocked."

I think that's why I'm so unexplainably drawn to flowers, because I hope that one day my hands will be able to recreate the raw beauty of a freshly delivered bouquet, and draw out that same beautiful moment on someone's face. - b.

I recently had what I thought was a genius idea for an art series. It involved flowers, sketching, photography and ultimately a seasonal series of blooms in our area. Like all of my ideas (I come up with "genius" ideas all the time) the beginning went so smoothly. I gathered inspiration for the images, picked a date to shoot, collected a bucket full of blooms, and my china markers- marching off into the sunset of what I was sure would be the start of something wonderful. And that's where everything went wrong, I had forgotten a very important cardinal rule...

All great ideas start with the first idea, but they rarely end there.

What do I mean by that? Well the really great ideas that turn into something marvelous or life changing rarely stay exactly as the initial thought came to you. They evolve and develop as you do research, experiment, and expand the scope of what the idea could mean. The idea is rooted in that lightbulb moment, but it can't stay there. 

Unfortunately, I all too often forget to take a step back and imagine how I can improve upon something. Instead ploughing along with the first idea as if it were an infallible object worth coveting. The results are projects I'm not proud of, or that feel only partially complete. But I'm learning.

This time I'm taking the lessons I learned from this first experiment and carrying them with me into the next iteration of this idea. There are parts I loved, most of which you don't see above (I have to keep some of it a secret), and I'm excited to push forward with those aspects in hopes I'll one day create that great idea I've always been dreaming of.

Do you allow your ideas to settle and grow into something really beautiful, or do you choke them off at first bloom? - b.