Flora Bowley's e-course

I'm taking Flora Bowley's online e-course called "Bloom True". She's one of my favorite painters and lives here in Portland. I love how nature inspires her paintings and her use of color, the contrasts of light and dark. Her paintings have a very organic, feminine feeling.

You might ask how do you take a painting class online? Each Tuesday and Friday, we paint with specific instructions. It's all very abstract with many layers. I started a notebook for the class and made the above cover with a couple layers of paint. It's a Strathmore watercolor notebook. I painted a layer of absorbent ground on the shiny surface, a layer of watercolor paint and then a layer of acrylic paint.

This week, we concentrated on inspiration. Here are a couple of my sketches.

Nature inspires my artwork and is a common theme I like to explore.


Midway through the course, here are my two canvases. For me, they are large- 24x30 inches. I bought a sturdy table easel that holds up to a 39 inch canvas for the work. At this stage, both canvases have six layers of paint. Flora says her painting often have ten or more layers.


The scary part comes next. To use all the techniques we learned to create another layer that brings the painting together. This is where courage comes to play and I just have to go for it.