As the month of October drew to a close, I had a decision to make: do I continue painting flowers for a year, or stop, or do something else? Painting the same subject for a year is strangely appealing, but when I contemplated it I couldn’t help wishing I had chosen another subject. Something I would gain more benefit from, like faces, or just ‘people’.

Not that I didn’t gain anything from painting flowers. They are a subject I’ve felt I’ve never been much good at, so I had a lot to learn from focusing on them. I could learn a lot more, but I can see that there would be a learning curve that was initially steep and exciting, then would taper off to being nearly flat with just occasional little steps up.

Better to have the benefit and fun of the steep learning curve over and over, by tackling a different theme each month. So I considered those other subjects I wished I’d chosen. Faces. Hands and feet. Pets. Birds. Then there were subjects that I wouldn’t want to study for a year, but would have fun with over a shorter time. Cars. Buildings. Food. Toys. To that list I added kitchenalia and accessories (hats, bags, shoes, etc.). I split pets into cats and dogs. That gave me twelve subjects if I included flowers.

So instead of painting or drawing the one subject for a year, I’m going to try to tackle a different one each month.

Each of the subjects is going to require different kinds of materials and levels of preparation. With toys, food, accessories and kitchenalia I can plausibly work entirely from life – which has the extra challenge of requiring me to arrange backdrops and lighting. With cars, cats, dogs, birds, faces and hands I will have to work from reference photos much of the time. Painting in a tiny sketchbook was fun, but I was very ready to work at a bigger size. I also decided to use different mediums and grounds each time, though I could also choose to use a mix for a particular subject.

The practicalities of painting every day are a challenge in themselves. First there’s keeping the time commitment to a workable length. Then there’s ergonomics. One of the reasons I decided not to paint flowers for a year was it had me sitting in awkward, hunched positions way too often and my back was starting to protest.

In fact, the reason this post is a bit late is I had a back flare up that was probably related to spending more time painting. The next post will feature the paintings from the first week of November. With me not posting about Christmas presents I’m making, things may get very art-centric for a while, but hopefully that’ll change in a few weeks.