Georgia O’Keefe Flowers

"When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment" 

- Georgia O'Keefe

While employed at a flower nursery, I worked daily a midst rows and rows of zinnias. These colorful flowersbecame a familiar sight and I always admired their beauty. However, my attempts to recreate these beautiful flowers through conventional artistic methods proved to be a difficult task. For this project, I decided to base my drawing on the key characteristics, which in my opinion, make the zinnia a uniquely beautiful flower. I hoped by focusing on a few characteristics, the project would finally come to life as I saw it in my mind. The first characteristic I focused on was that zinnia's are often covered in butterflies. I found this ironic because I also had butterflies as I started this daunting  task of creating this flower. The second characteristic is the more blooms you snip from zinnias, the more blooms they produce. I created draft after draft until I finally produced a beautiful realistic looking bloom. The third and final characteristic is a zinnia will live until the first frost. I also had to stick around for the long hall until I completed the watercolor project.  My interpretation of a Georgia O'Keefe flower was one of the most labor intensive and frustrating, but I guess those are the things we go though to bloom.
Georgia O'Keefe Flowers Tutorial