Encouraged by the success of the previous day’s flower using pencil, I did the same the next.

The following day, however, I had only 15-20 mins free to paint and it was raining, so I took a snap of a strawberry flower and whipped this up.

Strawberry flowers are really quite interesting, when you look at them closely. They’ve been blooming like mad and the flowers turning into berries, but we’ve not had enough warm, sunny weather for them ripen.

The following day was a rest day and I had plenty of time, so I brought some roses inside and set up with the gouache again.

I don’t know if it shows how much I was struggling. My neck had been getting cranky over the last few days, and I’d had trouble sleeping. My feet had also started to ache in the night and it spread up my legs over the day. By the evening I was having a full-on flare up and I was so tired I fell asleep in front of the tv then hauled myself off to bed at 8:30.

The next day I felt better but far from 100%, so decided to take it easy. I searched my phone for an easy flower and found this native violet.

While painting these evening primroses, I realised that painting every day in a tiny sketchbook, sometimes perched on a stool and hunched over to get a good look at a flower was probably not doing my back any good.

Still a bit sore, mostly in the neck, I found this cheery sunflower in my photos. It wasn’t too big a challenge.

Hoping to be a bit nicer to my back the next day, I chose a photo of another Clivia, but while it was more comfortable than working in the garden, it was a quite fussy painting and I spent far too long on it.

My friend KRin came over the next day with these delightfully delicate purple flowers.

Then I plucked some lotus flowers from where they were peeping out underneath the evening primrose.

And finally, I took on the challenge of this grevillea flower.

At the end of the book was a few empty pages, so I wrote about my aims and what I learned. I was definitely ready to wind up the challenge, but also excited to start a new one. Which I’d already mostly set up for by then. I’d love to keep up a daily art practise, but looking ahead I can see a few days coming on which it’ll be to be difficult to find the time. I suspect I’m going to find that daily painting was much easier in lockdown!