We’re back home in England from our France trip, and on the long drive we listened to a podcast about the French Revolution. It’s July 14 tomorrow, a date famously associated with the storming of the Bastille, it’s also the birthdate of Gustav Klimt.

Instead of featuring this artist so well known for his iconic paintings, I opted to focus on the creator of the beautiful dresses that often feature in Klimt’s works. This week’s Coloricombo heighlights Emilie Louise Flöge, the Austrian fashion designer, businesswoman, life partner and muse of Klimt.

Flöge (1874-1952) was from a wealthy Viennese family where her father, Hermann Flöge owned a factory that produced popular premium meerschaum smoking pipes. (As an aside, he’s also the likely subject of Klimt’s portrait Old Man on his Death Bed.)

Twelve years younger than Klimt, the two met around 1891 when her sister, Helene, married his brother, Ernst. Ernst died the following year and Gustav Klimt effectively became part of the extended Flöge family circle, and spent almost every summer with them at Lake Attersee where many of his landscapes were painted. He painted Flögge’s formal portrait in 1902, and her Reformkleid designs and patterns turn up throughout his later work, including in The Kiss.

Klimt was by all accounts a womaniser who fathered around fourteen children, but his relationship with Flöge is generally described as something different — more equal, more intellectually intimate and built on mutual creative respect. Klimt and Flöge lived apart and led parallel careers during the day, with Klimt working at his studio and Flöge and her sisters managing their thriving business, but they frequently spent time together in the evenings including appearances together at society events.

Photographs of Flöge and Klimt, and of Flöge in a Reform Dress

I mentioned Flöge’s business: her first job was as a seamstress and she worked with her sisters Pauline and Helene at their dressmaking school. The three then opened Schwestern Flöge in 1904, a fashion design studio that quickly became the place Vienna’s most stylish women went to be dressed.

Whilst Klimt was reinventing Austrian painting, Emilie Flöge was doing the same for Austrian couture. Viennese fashion in 1900 still meant the corset and the cinched waist. Her salon specialised in Reformkleid instead: loose, flowing, un-corseted dresses that actually allowed movement, in the same bold geometries Klimt was putting into his portraits, several of which were of her.

Whilst most fashion houses at the time relied on sketches or word of mouth. Flöge posed in her own garments for the camera, controlling exactly how the clothes were seen. Klimt photographed her as well and looking at those images now gives the impresson of two people testing the same idea in different mediums. Her salon stocked Wiener Werkstätte textiles, the design collective Klimt was closely tied to, and she worked directly with its designers on patterns exclusive to her house.

Klimt died in 1918 and the fashion house ran for two decades after that, closing during the Nazi takeover in 1938. In that time, Flöge and her sisters built a modern business that set trends way beyond it’s time.

Read an article in Harpers Bazaar titled ‘Before there was Coco Chanel, there was Emilie Flöge’ here and another article from Vogue here. There’s a profile of Flöge here and an article that profiles both Flöge and Klimit for an exhibition titled Modern Couples here.

“Portrait of Emilie Flöge”, oil on canvas, Gustav Klimt 1908

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Periwinkle, Verdigris, Lilac & Pale Gold. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.

W28 Shapes

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As we slowly wend our way through France on the way back to the UK we have stopped in a number of historic towns and cities: Brantôme, Limoges, Loches and Tours. We are currently in rural Normandy for a few nights with plans to visit the village where David Hockney had a home, as well as some of the beaches used during the D-Day landings.

Since we are spending long hours on the road we’ve been listening to podcasts. A favourite, and very informative one is The Rest is History - the episodes about Joan of Arc were very interesting and we’re currently listening to the series on the French Revolution.

Contrary to what’s widely recognised as a comment by Marie Antoinette in response to the hardship of peasants going hungry, she never actually said “Let them eat cake”. You can read more about this here. There are hundreds of portraits and paintings of this French queen and I was surprised that she was also the patron of a female artist called Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun.

Vigée le Brun (1755-1842) had a fascinating life. A self-taught artist, the National Gallery profile of her states “at 15 she was painting the aristocracy, in her 20s she was the favoured painter of Marie-Antoinette, and by her 30s she was fleeing the French Revolution”.

Born in Paris, Vigée le Brun’s father was a portrait painter who died when she was twelve. She followed in his footsteps and by the time she was in her early teens, had a modest clientele. Her works gained attention, so much so that in 1774 her studio was closed as she had been operating without a licence! She joined the Académie de St Luc to resolve this, one of very few women admitted, and albeit after the academy had unwittingly exhibited some of her works.

Her fame really took off when she began painting Marie Antoinette, over thirty portraits in total, and received the queen’s patronage which allowed her to join the Académie Royale in 1783, having been previously rejected.

Vigée le Brun didn’t just paint the queen looking regal and remote, the portrait fashion of the time. She painted her holding a rose and in a plain dress, looking like an actual person who’s simply enjoying themselves. She was able to catch a softness in her sitters without ever making them look weak - they appeared relaxed, often seen smiling with teeth visible. These were some of the most quietly radical portraiture of the century.

In 1789 the French Revolution broke out, and Vigée le Brun’s close association with the royals was being carefully scrutinised. Instead of waiting for a possible guillotining, she left for Italy with her daughter and didn’t return until her name was removed from a list of counter-revolutionaries in 1802.

During that time she didn’t stop working. She went to Rome, to Vienna and to St Petersburg, welcomed across Europe’s royals courts. She was elected to art academies everywhere and, as a woman with no formal schooling, gathered credentials that her male peers could only dream of.

Vigée le Brun painted around six hundred works in her lifetime, wrote her memoirs in her seventies and outlived nearly all of her sitters and detractors. However it isn’t her portraits of Europe’s 18th century rulers that appeal to me most, it’s her self-portraits. Dozens of them, she painting herself as an artist, brush in hand, looking straight out at you, unbothered. There really is a quiet confidence in them, and you get the feeling that she was simply good at what she did without the need to make a fuss about it.

Read more about Vigée le Brun here and here and watch a video introduction from the National Gallery above.

“Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, oil on canvas, ~1782

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Pale Blue, Straw Yellow, Dusty Rose & Deep Indigo. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes found in the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.

W27 Shapes

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We are still in the rural Dordogne area of France where there’s been an incredible heatwave with daily temperatures in the high 30s or low 40s (over 100F) Yesterday the clouds rolled in bringing welcome rain and delicious cool air.

In addition to the Medieval villages, impressive castles and beautiful landscape, this area of Perigord is also world renowned for it’s wealth of prehistoric art. It has been an indulgence to enter deep, dark caves and discover drawings on the rock walls that were made many thousands of years ago - it is an incredible experience to see these up close. Yesterday I went on a tour of the Grotte de Rouffignac.

It’s known as the Cave of the Hundred Mammoths and is a vast underground limestone labyrinth that stretches nearly eight kilometres (five miles) through the remains of an ancient underground river. Around 13,000 to 15,000 years ago, Magdalenian hunter-gatherers ventured three kilometres (two miles) into this darkness with nothing but chestnut-wicked torches and pigments and started drawing and engraving over two hundred animal figures onto the walls and ceilings.

What makes Rouffignac remarkable is the dominance of a single animal. Of the 240 figures, 158 are mammoths which is an astonishing proportion when you consider that mammoth depictions are actually quite rare in prehistoric art - these figures make up about 30% of all mammoth representations found in Palaeolithic art across Europe. Other animal drawings in the cave include woolly rhinoceros, horses, bisons and ibex.

The artists definitely knew what a mammoth looked like, the anatomies are precise from the characteristic hump on the back, the full detail of the eye, the peculiar two-fingered extremity of the trunk and even the flap that protected the animal’s bottom against bitter cold. I was struck by how beautiful the drawings and engravings are, there’s a soft, almost feminine touch with the sensitivity of the depictions.

Technically the artists worked with manganese dioxide, a black mineral pigment, applying it with pieces of charcoal or stone to achieve different densities and effects. For engravings, they employed flint tools, bone implements and their own fingers on softer clay walls. There’s a definite mix of techniques: some are engraving, others are painting and many combine both with an engraved outline then a fill or shadow with pigment.

The ceiling of the main gallery, the Grand Plafond, is the masterpiece: sixty five animals intertwined in a composition that required the artists to work lying on their backs. The scale is monumental, especially when you remember they were drawing on a horizontal ceiling and working by the light of flickering torches. The image below gives an idea of the creation, it is also depicted on a French stamp from 2006.

We’re told that children painted here too: researchers have identified lines drawn with fingertips in soft cave clay that were made by very young children, perhaps two to five years old. Some of these marks reach heights that suggest the children were held up by adults to make them. There’s something profound in that image, a parent holding a child high so they could leave their mark on stone 13,000 years ago.

Understandably, photographs of the cave aren’t allowed so I’ve taken colours this week from actual ochre pigments I bought in Montignac.

For more about the Grotte de Rouffignac, read on here and here.

“Pigments Naturels (Ochre)” , natural pigments

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Stone, Umber Brown, Red Brick & Yellow Ochre. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I’m including some shapes, two wooly mammoths and an ibex, inspired by the cave artworks which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.

W26 Shapes

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On our drive from England to the Dordogne in France we stayed overnight in two cities: I mentioned Rouen two weeks ago, the other one is Poitiers, a city that has been in existence since pre-Roman times. By chance I saw posters advertising a retrospective exhibition for Sara Lipska at the city’s Musée Sainte Croix and had to pop in before we continued on our travels, to find out more about this relatively unknown sculptor, painter and designer from the early 20th century.

Before I talk about Lipska, a brief tribute to the extraordinary artist David Hockney who died on 12 June at the age of 88, it was his funeral this last week. He was groundbreaking with an iconic style, irreverent and ever evolving. Hockney accomplished so much in his lifetime and lived in France for a number of years later in his life, apparently so that he could smoke at restaurants!

Hockney was featured previously on Coloricombo back in 2024. Read about his achievements in his obituary from The Guardian.

Lipska (1882–1973) was born in Mlawa, Poland in 1882 into a wealthy Hassidic Jewish family. In 1904 she was one of the first female students admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She studied sculpture under Xawery Dunikowski and became his muse, partner and collaborator. In 1912 Lipska left Poland, packing her bags and relocated to Paris with their daughter (where she lived for the rest of her life).

In Paris, Lipska moved in circles with some of the most creative Slavic voices of the early twentieth century: Natalia Goncharova, Sergei Diaghilev and Tamara de Lempicka. In 1919 she began designing sets and costumes for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Her designs featured bold colours and simplified patterns inspired by Cubist and Fauvist art and it was through costume design that she started combining textiles and embroidery, fusing together Futurism, the angular shapes of Cubism and the clean modernism of Art Deco.

By the 1920s, Lipska had become a renowned fashion designer, opening boutiques on the Champs Elysées in Paris and in Monte Carlo. She also worked as a sculptor, painter and interior designer, creating numerous busts including those of Diaghilev, Paul Poiret and Arthur Rubinstein and moved between these disciplines with equal mastery.

Despite all this success, Lipska remains an enigmatic figure. Extant examples of her work are rare and pieces bearing her label or signature are uncommon. If you look hard you can find her work scattered across museums like the Met, Centre Pompidou or the Smithsonian but she’s been largely overlooked in art history.

I am so glad I discovered this artist who wasn’t confined to one discipline, one medium or one identity. She moved fluidly between fine art and design, between sculpture and fashion and between the gallery and the boutique.

She fits perfectly into the definition of an overlooked female artist and it is wonderful that her daughter has bestowed so many of her works to the museum in Poitiers. Read more on their website here. There’s a great article on Culture.pl that shows some amazing examples of her varied ouvre here.

“Mittens”, silk and wool with embroidery, Sara Lipska, ~1920-1930’s

Colour Combination

The colours this week are picked from embroidered mittens I saw at the exhibition Light Emerald, Melon, Milk Chocolate & Cobalt. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. If you know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity please share this post with them.

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by another embroidery of Lipska’s featuring stylised florals, you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish

“Habit à la disposition”, embroidery, Sara Lipska, ~1920-1929 (Source)

W25 Shapes

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For most of June we are in South West France, staying in the Vézère river valley close to the medieval town of Montignac, the Lascaux caves and other prehistoric sites. It’s a wonderful region to explore.

Whenever we are in this part of France, I’m struck by the expanse of green that surrounds us and the various shades of it. We’ve enjoyed long walks with our dogs in the countryside and next to the Vézère and Dordogne rivers every day - at this time of year it is rejuvenating to walk under the fresh green canopies of tall trees in ancient woodlands, but also amongst the farmlands, hedgerows and grass covered valleys. Together with virtually no light pollution and incredible views of the stars it’s a truly relaxing place to be.

Like many creatives I’m a total sucker for art materials, and whilst in Montignac last week I obviously had to stop at the Pastels Girault gallery-shop. This company has been making pastels by hand since 1780 and, they come in a range of 400 beautiful colours. I have to confess, pastels aren’t amongst my favourite materials to work in, but I had buy a few sticks, and opted for some shades of green (photo after use!).

Green is the most abundant colour in nature and it sits in the middle of the colour spectrum, between yellow and blue. That makes it a natural mixing colour, one that artists have been creating deliberately for centuries. In the Renaissance, artists mixed blue and yellow to make green because pure green pigments were either expensive or unreliable. These days we’ve got the luxury of synthetic greens but these often feel flat compared to the luminous, complex colours we see in nature. Why’s that? It’s because natural greens are never pure: they’re always tinged with yellow, blue, grey or brown depending on light, shadow and season.

Historically, green held different meanings across cultures and time periods. In Medieval art it symbolised hope and renewal whilst in the Renaissance it represented life and fertility. The green pigments used then were natural but with issues - Verdigris was made from copper and was toxic and unstable whilst Malachite was precious and expensive. It wasn’t until synthetic pigments were developed that artists had reliable, accessible greens.

Viridian, created in 1838, revolutionised landscape painting because it was both permanent and brilliant, and could be mixed with other colours without losing integrity. This changed how artists approached depicting foliage and natural scenes.

What’s fascinating about green is its range and subtlety. A single tree in nature contains dozens of different greens like pale yellow-greens in new spring growth, deep blue-greens in shadow and warm olive-greens in fallen leaves. Our eyes are remarkably sensitive to these variations and we can distinguish more shades of green than almost any other colour.

In terms of colour theory, green is unique because it sits at the point where warm and cool meet. Yellow-greens vibrate with energy and warmth, suggesting growth and Spring. Blue-greens feel calm, cool, and contemplative, suggesting water and shadow. This means green can work with virtually any other colour on the palette - it bridges warm and cool.

Look at this selection of colours from Girault, each a green with it’s own descriptive name and colour code that you can see here or take a look at the shades on Wikipedia here.

Below is a recording of a short video of me drawing in pastels some leaves in this week’s five colours. I also use a smudging tool and added detail afterwards with a dark green Luminance pencil (code 719) I use Degas Fixative to fix the colours, it is odour free and non toxic.

“Greens”, pastel on watercolour paper, Esté MacLeod 2026

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Sap Green, Olive, Sage, Forest Green & Green Black. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. If you know of someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity please share this post with them.

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.

W24 Shapes

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After a busy May we packed the car with everything we’ll need for an early summer working break including art materials, paints and canvases, loaded our two dogs and drove to the Dordogne region of France. The trip was split over a few days and on the way we overnighted in Rouen, on the banks of the Seine, and Poitiers further south.

On our first stop we enjoyed walking around Rouen with it’s links to the Vikings and Joan of Arc. We visited the Cathédral Notre-Dame de Rouen famous for it’s three towers, each completed in a different style over a period of eight hundred years. With foundations dating from 1030 and a spire reaching 151m (495ft) it was briefly the tallest building in the world.

The interior of the cathedral is vast and impressive and I was struck by the beautifully crafted 15th century stone staircase that leads to the library. I also noticed something unusual: flint nodules that are present in the carved pillars and some building stones. These are Caumont stone, a Cretaceous chalk stone that naturally contains these flint ‘kidneys’.

On one interior wall you can see medieval graffiti, depictions of ships carved roughly in the stone. These etchings were carved by sailors and maritime pilgrims visiting the cathedral to pray for safe journeys as historically Rouen was one of France’s most important river and maritime ports.

The cathedral is also famously the subject of Claude Monet Rouen Cathedral series. Monet (1840-1926) painted these between 1892 and 1893. He rented space across from the cathedral (apparently on the second floor of a woman’s clothing store), setup a small studio and began an extraordinary experiment. Sometimes working on fourteen canvases in succession, he would work on each canvas for no more than an hour - once the light had changed beyond an acceptable limit, he would stop and wait for another day with similar conditions to continue.

He ended up with over thirty paintings that focus on the effects of light, weather and atmosphere rather than on the cathedral’s architecture. Of these, twenty eight canvases are of the western façade of the Gothic cathedral from a nearly identical angle.

Monet wrote ‘Everything changes, even stone’ and he demonstrated that the same subject is never actually ‘the same’. The cathedral’s intricate façade is solid, monochromatic stone, but looking at the canvases you can see mauves and greens, pinks and oranges. He was painting colours not the architecture and was documenting what light does and how it transforms everything it touches.

In 1895, Monet exhibited twenty of these cathedral paintings at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, inviting viewers to stand before them as a complete experience, and not as individual paintings. The display was a massive critical success, drawing praise from fellow masters like Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne.

Remarkably, Monet never actually went inside the cathedral until after he had completed all his paintings - the interior wasn’t really of interest to him!

Read more about Monet and his series here and watch a short video by Sarah Sze for Musée d’Orsay here. I’ve included more about the cathedral itself here and information from the city’s tourist office here.

“Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Setting Sun”, oil on canvas, Claude Monet, 1892

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Powder Blue, Terracotta, Warm Yellow & Cadet Blue. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish. These are based on motifs seen around the cathedral.

W23 Shapes

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The Colori Flori Summit has just finished, if you wanted to jump in and join us do so today please. The summit comes with lifetime access and I’ve kept registration open an extra 24 hours, closing tonight (Monday 1 June) at midnight PST.

Colori Flori registration

A year ago the first Colori Flori Summit concluded with a bonus project where colours from the commencing week’s #coloricombo prompt were used to paint the floral artwork you can see below.

The video lesson of the creating process is shared with contributing subscribers, scroll to the bottom.

The post from last year ago was titled ‘Pink makes everything fabulous’ (attributed to Barbie!) and proved to be a hit, this interesting combination of maroon, mustard, sage and the punchy pop of pink.

I’m sharing the palette again this week, I personally love this dynamic combination and think it deserves an encore.

In this year’s summit, two artists chose to incorporate these colours in their lessons, Janet Skates and Betsy Walton, and they both had their own unique interpretations of how to use the colours with Betsy diving into colour mixing and creating a beautiful range of colours including a variety of neutrals.

Did you know that Barbie has her own pink? It’s Pantone 219C which is pretty darn close to the Opera Pink in this palette.

Opera pink’s origins trace back to the development of synthetic dyes in the mid-19th century, particularly the discovery of mauveine by William Henry Perkin in 1856. This breakthrough in chemistry led to a revolution in available colors, making vivid, previously impossible shades accessible for the first time.

What we now call opera pink was popularised during the Victorian era’s fascination with the bold, saturated colours that were made possible by these new aniline dyes. The colour became associated with the theatrical world because opera houses and theatres of the late 1800s embraced these dramatic new pigments for their costumes, sets and interior decorations.

Before synthetic dyes, achieving such intense pink shades was near impossible. Natural sources like cochineal insects could produce reds and some pinks, but nothing quite as vivid and stable as what became possible with synthetic chemistry. Madder root and other plant-based dyes also provided pinks, but they were typically more muted.

Today opera pink is created using modern synthetic pigments and can be precisely formulated across different media, from paints to textiles to digital displays. The paint however remains a fugitive colour and it’s known that it’ll fade over time.

Read all about opera pink in more detail here.

“Pink peonies, Colori Flori”, gouache and aquarelle, Esté MacLeod, 2025

Colour Combination

The colours making a repeat appearance from the archive are Opera Pink, Maroon, Mustard & Pale Sage. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour if you wish. Create an artwork in any medium or style.

Share what you create, we love to see how the colours are used for art making. If you’re posting on Instagram, please tag #coloricombo and #estemacleod and join us in the private Facebook group Creative Prompts

Shapes

Shapes found in tomatoes,these watercolour and Neocolor II studies of tomatoes were part of my lesson in Colori Flori 2025 titled Beyond Grey. These shapes are also elements used in the Pink Peonies artwork on this post.

W22 Shapes

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For Contributing Subscribers

I’ve included the tomato shapes as they’re used as cutouts in the video lesson where we create the watercolour and mixed media floral below.

Read more

There are fourteen lessons from fourteen artists (including mine) in the summit, read on to see more information about each of them + feedback from students. If this tempts you to join us click the button below. Don’t miss out, registration is only open until 31 May.

All the info

🌼 Janet Skates

@janetskatesart | Pretty in Pink | Monday 18 May

The first of our fourteen lessons is from Janet Skates titled Pretty in Pink.

An artwork by Janet is featured on the current cover of Flow magazine and in this lesson you will learn how to create a similar piece using mostly gouache and watercolour with details added in dip pen and ink.

🌼 Dar James

@indarsworld | Petals and Pieces | Tuesday 19 May

Dar James created two artworks using the colour palette to create cool and warm artworks in her lesson on the second day of Colori Flori. In her lesson you will learn how to use a simple grid structure and a spontaneous approach to create botanical compositions that shift between recognisable florals and more abstracted forms. Techniques incorporated include drawing, painting, and collaging to build in layers.

🌼 Julie Sydenham

@julie.sydenham.art | Flowers & a Finch | Wednesday 20 May

If you like to paint in watercolour, you’ll find so much value in this class!

Jules creates her own magic combining a vase of poppies with an Australian Zebra Finch in this lesson using pen, watercolour and watercolour pencil to create a layered artwork.

🌼 Carrie Smith

@carriesmithart | Mounted Floral Medallion | Thursday 21 May

In Carrie's Colori Flori lesson she demonstrates how to paint a bold medallion with layered patterns and intricate details. In her class you will discover how colour, repetition, and simple mark-making tools can transform a design and bring each of those aspects to life.

🌼 Katie O’Shea

@katie_oshea_design | Paint to Pattern | Friday 22 May

In Paint to Pattern you’ll learn how to create a pattern composition using just paper, pencil and acrylic markers and working with squares to build a repeating design.

Once the layout is set, you’ll explore options to complete the design with acrylic markers. Katie will also show you some easy ways to explore and test the repeat pattern.

🌼 April Howlett

@monkeymintaka | Plants as People | Saturday 23 May

This sketchbook demo from April aka @Monkeymintaka is so much fan to watch. April combines her love of quirky characters with florals by creating anthropomorphic characters in her lesson called Plants as People.

🌼 Clare Youngs

@clareyoungs | Make Your Mark | Sunday 24 May

Clare Youngs is an designer maker with an iconic style, she is known for her beautiful stylised collages of animals.

Clare recorded an informative lesson covering some of her favourite techniques including wax resist and creating texture with tools to create beautiful collage papers. Claire will show you how to ideas for cutting and arranging them before gathering the finished pieces and presenting them in a handmade sketchbook.

🌼 Betsy Walton

@betsywalton | Finding Range within a Limited Palette | Monday 25 May

Week two of Colori Flori started with a very informative lesson by Betsy. She produces something quite remarkable whilst also showing us how to mix a beautiful range of colours including warm neutrals by using a limited palette. She demonstrates how shifts in saturation, value, and hue can create depth by using just the colour palette of four colours. Watching the techniques used to create a floral posy is a real treat.

🌼 Miriam Bos

@_miriambos | Strokes of Sunflower |Tuesday 26 May

Miriam’s lesson is about observing the shape of a sunflower before sketching and playing with their shapes. She shares how to make a composition and work in layers to create fun textures to paint these beautiful flowers. Miriam shares helpful tips and technical details about painting in gouache.

🌼 Rowan Sivyer

@littlerowanredhead | Faux Chine Collé Poppies | Wednesday 27 May

In Faux Chine Collé Poppies Rowan demonstrates expertly how to combine block printing and gel printing to achieve eye-catching floras.

Rowan demonstrates a number of interesting printing techniques and layering processes beginning with designing and carving of a floral rubber stamp! It’s used for gel printing before using she uses a reverse collage method to ‘colour in’ the poppies with textured papers. A fascinating mono printing process to explore.

🌼 Claire Desjardins

@claire_desjardins_art | Color Notes from Sicily | Thursday 28 May

If you’re familiar with Claire’s work, you’ll know she normally works in a very large scale. This lesson was recorded on location and it’s interesting to see how she adapts and works to a much smaller scale from a kitchen table in Sicily.

This lesson reflects a more intuitive way of working - responding to surroundings, simplifying materials, and letting each mark guide the next.

🌼 Estee Zales

@estee.zales | Imagined Flowers | Friday 29 May

In Estee’s lesson you will learn how to create interesting textures and marks with landscapes as inspiration that’ll then become elements of a stylised floral collage artwork.

Rather than aiming for realistic botanical illustration, she encourages you to explore imagined floral forms through playful mark-making, material experimentation, and intuitive composition

🌼 Tansy Hargan

@palimpsestparade | Freesia Facets | Saturday 30 May

Tansy explains: “I’m a colour synesthete, which means that everything I encounter, consider, or undertake is spontaneously experienced as a colour.

In my Freesia Facets lesson, I use a limited colour palette and, starting with a single square lozenge of colour, I progress into an exploration of the way colours merge when dropped in to one another.

🌼 Esté MacLeod

@estemacleod | Doodle Bloom | Sunday 31 May

To end the summit on 31 May we revisit ideas from the two B is for Bloom warm up sketchbook projects shared over the weekend before Colori Flori started. Here’s the first one:

And here’s the second one:

In my Doodle Bloom lesson you will create imaginary botanicals in mixed media. Explore ways to create stylised florals and plants using printouts of shapes that have been part of the weekly Coloricombo prompts this year. The various cut out shapes are the starting points for sketchbook drawings and bigger layered floral paintings on watercolour paper.

Remember, registration for the Colori Flori Summit 2026 closes this weekend. You can join us until 31 May. The summit comes with lifetime access to all the lessons so you can work at your own pace and revisit projects later.

All the info about Colori Flori 2026

This week’s colours come from a layered watercolour artwork I’ve created for this years Colori Flori Summit. I love painting in aquatic colours with a warm yellow and brown for contrast. You can get a glimpse of the artwork in progress below.

Week Two of the summit has started after the first seven lessons were shared last week together with two bonus projects that have been added right here on Substack.

You can still join Colori Flori which includes lifetime access, registration closes this weekend (midnight PST on 31 May).

All the Colori Flori details

“Doodle Bloom” watercolour and gouache on paper, Esté MacLeod, 2026

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Peacock Blue, Turquoise, Pastel Green, Mustard & Sepia. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.

W21 Shapes

560KB ∙ PDF file

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The Colori Flori Summit 2026 kicked off on Monday with fourteen artists teaching lessons inspired by florals and botanicals. All lessons are prerecorded, edited and packaged up, to be shared daily from 18-31 May. Each lesson incorporates a limited colour palette chosen from the #coloricombo archive - can you believe that I’ve been sharing these weekly prompts since the start of 2022?

On Tuesday 26 May will present Strokes of Sunflower using the palette below. Miriam chose this palette from Week 8 of 2023 which was way before I moved to Substack so I am sharing it again today.

“Stroke of Sunflower” studies, pencil and gouache in sketchbook, Miriam Bos, 2026

Each lesson in the summit is shared with a link to the original Coloricombo prompt where you can revisit the source of the colour palette, normally chosen from an artwork by an artist from the past. You can read Miriam’s post about the lesson here.

PS Join us, it’s not too late to sign up to the Colori Flori Summit that runs until 31 May.

All the prerecorded lessons come with lifetime access so you can watch everything at a pace that suits you, do the projects in your own time and revisit lessons again at a later date. Find out more here.

Join Colori Flori

Originally posted on 20 February, 2023

We were out for a long walk today, a crisp sunny blue sky day. Spring is definitely in the air. Snowdrops and daffodils could be seen along the route we walked, signalling the new season to come. I grew up in South Africa and always thought that daffodils were exotic flowers, very rarely seen in sub-tropical gardens. Here in England, they grow next to the road.

The painting I’ve chosen for this week’s #coloricombo is from the renowned British painter Winfred Nicholson.

Rosa Winifred Roberts (1893-1981) was born in Oxford, England to a wealthy, political family. She spent her youth painting as she lived between countryside properties in Cumberland and Yorkshire, as well as London. She studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, finishing there after World War One.

After marrying her painter husband, Ben Nicholson, in 1920, they travelled together through Europe, capturing local views from residences in France and Italy.

They had three children: Jake, Kate and Andrew who often feature in her paintings. There were tensions in the marriage and the couple eventually split, with Ben Nicholson going on to marry the sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

Despite being overshadowed by her husband during her lifetime, Winifred Nicholson is recognised as a major figure in British modernism. Her work is highly sought after and can be found in many collections across the world.

Her landscapes and still life paintings were characterised by soft colours and delicate brushwork, often depicting the landscapes and seascapes of Cornwall where she visited frequently.

One of her favourite compositions was to combine domestic objects together with a landscape, often placing flower arrangements on a windowsill in front of a the landscape beyond.

You can learn more about Nicolson here and here.

“Kate’s Flowers”, Oil on plywood, Winifred Nicolson, 1936

Colour Combination

The colours for this weeks prompt are Primrose, Sunshine, Pumpkin, Baby Blue and Mouse Grey.

Tag #coloricombo and #estemacleod when posting on Instagram and you are welcome to post on the private Facebook group Creative Prompts with Esté MacLeod.

Here’s the post for Week 20 if you missed it:

Colori Flori news

The first of the summit’s fourteen lessons features Janet Skates and is titled Pretty in Pink.

Have a look at the joyful magazine cover below, it is an artwork by Janet that is featured on the current cover of Flow, and in her lesson she demonstrates the processes used to create a similar piece.

The Colori Flori Early Bird discount offer has ended. If you would like to to jump in quick use the code COLORIFLORI20 for a special 20% discount for Substack readers valid until midnight PST tonight.

See link for Colori Flori information and registration

Signup for Colori Flori

In this video I demonstrate how to use B shapes to create two different floral artworks using aquarelle pencils. You’ll learn how to use the pencils to create texture, blend and layer colours.

There are two projects in this lesson. The first project is about repeating a floral design in a structured way, building on the sketchbook drawings from the first B is for Bloom lesson shared on Saturday. In the second project you will learn how to use the B shapes of the paper stencil in an artwork of a single flower, inspired by a peony.

You can find the palette and the stencil I used here:

The Colori Flori Summit runs from 18-31 May and kicks off on Monday at 9am London time when the first of our fourteen exclusive, prerecorded lessons is released.

Early Bird pricing is valid until the first lesson starts, signup now to take advantage of it.

You can register and get all the information you need here.

Join us!

Early Bird pricing ends at the same time, don’t miss out. You can register and get all the information you need here.

Join us!

To get us in the mood for this floral and colour themed event, I created two bonus projects that are released this weekend, one today and one on Sunday.

B is for Bloom is the topic and you see the palette and the shapes I’ll be using in both projects here.

Way back in the early days of Coloricombo (Week 26 of 2022), I featured a painting by André Brasilier. A few days ago I attended the Original Print Fair at Somerset house in London where this striking lithograph of his caught my eye, so I chose it for the #coloricombo palette that’s also used for two weekend bonus projects.

You might have noticed you’re receiving this colour prompt early! Here’s why:

The Colori Flori Summit starts on Monday and runs until the end of May and to get us in the mood for this floral and colour themed event, I created two bonus projects to be shared over the weekend. B is for Bloom is the topic of these projects and the shapes that are used in the sketchbook projects can be seen below.

Join Colori Flori

Brasilier was born in 1929 in the Loire Valley and is remarkably still making art at the age of ninety six. His paintings’ vivid colours and sense of movement, often featuring themes and motifs of horses, nature, music, flowers and women, have been compared to those of Matisse.

The way he uses the white of the paper to indicate the shape of the female figure is so effective in this lithograph where florals and foliage are dominant.

“La Dame Blanche”, lithograph, André Brasilier, 1973

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Lemon Yellow, Saffron, Olive and Charcoal. Use them along with contrasting dark and neutral light colours to create an artwork in any medium or style.

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including two downloadable sheets of letter shapes, this weeks’ shapes are mainly distorted versions of the letter B and the words B is for Bloom. You are invited to print out the PDF’s and use them in the bonus lesson coming up in my next post today

W20 Shapes

1.39MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Not long to go now… The Colori Flori Summit kicks off with some BONUS content this coming weekend to get us in the mood a fortnight of colourful creativity. This is free for everyone to view and will be available here on Substack. I hope you will join us.

The Summit itself runs from 18—31 May with the Early Bird pricing until the first lesson is released at 9am on Monday 18 May.

Register for Colori flori

Have a look below to find out more about all the wonderful artists participating and what they will be teaching in their lessons.

It would have Frank Stella’s birthday this week so the Coloricombo colours and shapes are chosen from this America painter, sculptor and printmaker’s works.

Stella (1936-2024) was born in Malden, Massachusetts and moved to New York in the late 1950s after studying history at Princeton.

When he arrived, the art scene was very much awash with Abstract Expressionism - think Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning & Franz Kline. The ‘gesture-and-emotion’ approach to painting, where canvas was treated as a site for action instead of just a surface, dominated the conversation.

Stella arrived in a New York that had taken over from Paris as the centre of the Western art world and the energy at the time was intense. Stella however wasn’t interested in pouring his feelings into a painting and instead was drawn to to the work of Jasper Johns, who’s Flag and Target series of paintings used repetition and geometric precision, solid lines depicting recognisable shapes and forms.

At aged twenty two, Stella bought some commercial enamel paint and a housepainters brush, drew guidelines with a pencil and ruler, then and started painting black stripes of the same width, evenly spaced on raw canvas. These became the Black Paintings, and when four of them were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, people paid attention.

He continued working in this style, albeit with colour added, in the 1960s when he took up printmaking. Stella never considered himself a Minimalist, although his work influence the movement greatly, and in the 1970s he started working with more gentle, coloured mixed media reliefs that featured curves and organic shapes, such as the Exotic Bird series.

In the late 70s and early 80s His work became increasingly 3D and began to incorporate architectural forms and materials such as aluminium and fibreglass and from the mid 80s to mid 90s he created an enormous body of work, corresponding to chapters in the novel Moby Dick. These were a definite departure from his earliest works with geometric forms curving and swirling, layered in collage form in incredibly vibrant colours.

Stella’s achievement include being the youngest artist ever to be granted a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and being honoured with the National Medal of Arts in 2009. His evolution showed that Minimalism didn’t have to be cold, that geometry could have emotion and that architecture could be incorporated into art.

This is impressive for someone who once said that every painting is "a flat surface with paint on it - nothing more".

You can watch this video of his work and read more about Stella here and here. Take a look at the progression from the Exotic Bird series to Moby Dick here and here.

I’ve chosen colours this week from a simple swatch of Stella’s and shapes from an Exotic Bird painting.

“Untitled”, acrylic and pencil on paper, Frank Stella, 1968

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Raspberry, Apple Green, Melon & Terracotta. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Please share this post with them.

Shapes

“Stella’s Albatross”, offset lithograph and screen print, Frank Stella, 1977

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by a Stella’s Albatross painting which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.

W19 Shapes

493KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Each of them has prepared and recorded a video lesson exclusive to this event, using a specific #coloricombo colour palette of their choice. In each lesson they’ll demonstrate techniques and processes in water based media to produce an outcome in response to the summit’s floral and botanical theme.

Let me introduce all of them properly in alphabetical order and tell you a bit about this amazing and dynamic group of creatives and what they will do in their lessons. What a lineup!

Tell me more

🇳🇱 Miriam Bos

@_miriambos | Strokes of Sunflower

Miriam hails from the Netherlands and enjoys bringing ideas to life through art and design. She works from her studio, creating illustrations for a diverse range of projects, including books, puzzles, games, fabric collections, stationery and home décor. Preferred mediums are gouache, crayons, acrylics, watercolour, pencils, and ink, often combined with digital techniques and collage.

“I have a passion for bright colors, crazy textures, and art that feels handmade. I guess it’s safe to say that I love making things.”

Miriam’s current focus is on creating picture books for the young ones and she’s the author and illustrator of the hugely successful series about the characters August the Fox and Suzy Squirrel.

In Miriam’s lesson you will learn how to explore ways to paint sunflowers with gouache using a more muted colour palette.

🇨🇦 Claire Desjardins

@claire_desjardins_art | Colour Notes from Sicily

Claire Desjardins is an award-winning abstract painter based in Gore, Quebec, who exhibits her paintings in galleries across North America. Her paintings, although abstract, take their visual cues from forms, colours, textures and patterns in nature: the feathers of a bird, the shades of turquoise in the water, how the light through the trees dapples on the ground below.

Beyond the canvas, her art transforms commercial and residential interiors, urban exteriors, housewares, furniture, package design and women’s apparel. Her work has appeared in major motion pictures and popular television shows. Claire’s long-standing corporate collaborations shape and define the customer experience – most notably for North American retail giant Anthropologie.

In her lesson Claire will show you how she adapts to work in a much smaller scale than her normal sized paintings, Claire recorded her lesson whilst on location in Sicily.

🇬🇧 Tansy Hargan

@palimpsestparade | Freesia Facets

Meditative and relaxing is how you can describe Tansy’s specific way of creating in the moment. Originally trained in both architecture and landscape architecture, Tansy is a colour synesthete*, artist and educator who uses colour and mindfulness to activate and regulate herself and her creative output.

Tansy took part in Colori Flori 2025 and her wonderful meditative way of creating was so enjoyable to watch, I cannot wait to share with you what Tansy does using Freesias as topic, and vibrant reds and yellow as her palette.

🇬🇧 April Howlett

@monkeymintaka | Plants as People

April is a mixed media illustrator and storyteller based in the Lake District of England where she loves to be out in nature and find inspiration in the beautiful landscapes, forests, and lakes of the area.

“I am obsessed with experimenting with traditional materials and quirky colour combinations and always aim to create art that tells rich and memorable stories.”

Better known as @monkeymintaka online, April loves to share her on livestreams and videos over on YouTube and Patreon.

In April’s lesson she will take you on a fantastic journey in her sketchbook, exploring ways to anthropomorphise plants, she turns plants into people in such a fun way, and you will get to learn a whole lot about combining water based mixed media!

🇺🇸 Dar James

@indarsworld | Petals and Pieces

Dar is a full-time mixed media artist, writer, and illustrator of six children’s picture books. A lifelong teacher and workshop leader, she trained with Golden Acrylics and is a Silver Brush Educator.

Based in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, she exhibits regionally, leads annual art retreats, and runs an online artists membership focused on developing artistic style, deepening colour understanding and building a strong foundation in acrylic through experimentation and play.

Dar is back this year after being part of the first Colori Flori summit, her lesson is a testament to her love of colour, botanical forms and use of patterns, a joy to watch.

🇬🇧 Esté MacLeod

@estemacleod | Doodle Bloom

Hello! I’m a professional artist and designer with a background in textile and surface pattern design. Alongside teaching online courses and running art retreats I create still life, landscape and floral paintings in acrylics and mixed media with galleries in the UK and internationally representing me. Artworks are often turned into designs that are licensed for use on all kinds of products, from wallpaper and textiles to homeware, ceramics, puzzles and stationery.

In my lesson for this summit you will explore different ways to incorporate shapes and doodles to become layered floral artworks.

🇺🇸 Katie O’Shea

@katie_oshea_design | Paint to Pattern

Katie O’Shea is a Bay Area-based artist whose vibrant work celebrates the beauty and complexity of the natural world. With a background in graphic design she seamlessly blends traditional and digital mediums, working in paint, pencil, and digital illustration to create detailed images of botanicals. Her keen eye for detail and colour brings each botanical subject to life, capturing both their delicate intricacies and bold forms.

Her art has found a global audience through licensing partnerships with designs appearing on a wide range of products, from home décor and textiles to stationery and packaging, allowing her unique vision to brighten everyday life in countless ways.

As she continues to explore new techniques and collaborations, Katie remains committed to creating art that inspires connection, wonder, and joy.

Katie will show you in her lesson a simple but very effective way to create an analog repeat pattern. You will learn how to use four pieces of paper and acrylic markers to develop your own design in repeat.

🇦🇺 Rowan Sivyer

@littlerowanredhead | Faux Chine Collé Poppies

Rowan Sivyer, AKA Little Rowan Redhead, is a Sydney-based printmaker, painter and self-confessed obsessed maker. She is also the author of the book, Modern Block Printing.

Driven by a lifelong passion for making, Rowan specialises in relief printing, carving and printing daily in her home studio. Her lino prints frequently feature Australian flora and she is known for not shying away from her bold use of colour.

In Rowan’s lesson you will discover how she creates a layered poppy themed artwork using two printmaking techniques. If you are tempted to try gel plate printing, or dive deeper into alternative printmaking techniques this lesson will be sure to spark brand new ideas.

🇺🇸 Janet Skates

@janetskatesart | Pretty in Pink

Janet is an artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She creates using acrylic paints, paint pens, markers, oil pastels, acrylic inks and watercolours and her gardens, nature walks, plants and music are her primary inspiration.

“I believe that our homes and our workspaces are sacred. My mission is to create artwork that enhances space and lends energy and love wherever it is.”

Janet will show you how she constructs a stylised still life painting using wet-on-wet watercolour techniques, colour mixing and pen-and-ink detailing in a beautiful colour palette. You are sure to discover some new techniques and ways of creating in this fun class.

🇺🇸 Carrie Smith

@carriesmithart | Mounted Floral Medallion

Carrie is a mixed media collage artist whose work is rooted in vibrant colour, layered pattern, and global inspiration gathered through her travels.

Known for her signature use of dot motifs and hand-painted patterns, she creates detail-rich, funky floral collage work that brings happiness and colour into the world.

In Carrie’s lesson she will demonstrate how she use pink and purple floral patterns along with fine details in a meditative creative process.

🇦🇺 Julie Sydenham

@julie.sydenham.art | Flowers & a Finch

Based on the beautiful South Coast of NSW Australia, Jules has operated her busy studio for over 26 years. As a gentle and creative guide, she believes in the power of finding meaning through making and works intuitively across sketchbooks and larger works, typically layering pen, paint and pattern to create art that feels both playful and deeply considered.

Through her classes, workshops, retreats and online content, Jules inspires others to reconnect with their creativity, quiet the inner critic and build confidence with their art.

Love working in watercolour? You are in for a treat, In Julie’s finch and floral themed lesson she will show you how she combines watercolour and aquarelle pencils to create interesting layers with patterns and many details added in delightful way.

🇺🇸 Betsy Walton

@betsywalton | Finding Range within a Limited Palette

Betsy is a Portland, Oregon based artist whose work centres on colour, pattern, and imagined environments. Drawing from nature and memory, she creates layered paintings that balance structure with intuition.

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in the Pacific Northwest, and she shares her approach to painting through workshops and special projects.

Interested in colour mixing? In Betsy’s class you will learn how to mix a beautiful range of colours from bright pinks to mustard and soft sage. She will demonstrate how she plans a stylised still life painting and create a richly layered artwork in acrylic gouache with delightful details.

🇬🇧 Clare Youngs

@clareyoungs | Make Your Mark

Clare Youngs is a collage artist who makes colourful and playful artworks from cut paper. Each piece of paper used is hand painted or printed with textures and pattern work and then cut and pieced together to make the finished piece. Her work has a strong graphic feel about it, which directly stems from her background in design and training as a graphic designer.

Pattern is an important feature of her artworks and she uses pen and ink, paint and printing methods to produce an endless variety of patterns to use, often printing a texture over a pattern to add another layer and depth to the finished piece. Clare’s work has a retro feel to it and her love of mid century design, especially textiles and children’s book illustration has been an influence when developing her own style.

People have often said that her artworks make them smile. This is something that is very important to Clare and in turn makes her smile!

I am so excited to introduce Clare as part of Colori Flori 2026. Clare is a master collage artist and in her jam packed lesson you will learn how to create interesting printed and painted papers for collaging.

🇪🇸 Estee Zales

@estee.zales | Imagined Flowers

Esther González, known online as Estee Zales, is a Spanish mixed-media artist and writer specialising in collage. Self-taught and endlessly curious, she is drawn to the small, the unusual, and the often overlooked.

Her practice spans visual diaries, picture books, editorial projects, fabric design, and floral work, blending personal exploration with creative experimentation.

She also runs a Substack workshop called Journal Rash, offering monthly prompts and drawing exercises. The workshop provides a private space to share work and explore creative experimentation without the pressure of performance.

It is not often that I encounter another person who shares my name, let alone one that is also an artist. I share Estee’s enthusiasm for details that can easily be overlooked. In Estee’s lesson you will learn how to create interesting textures and marks with landscapes as inspiration, to then become elements of a stylised floral collage artwork.

Early Bird registration

Early Bird registration for Colori Flori opened earlier this month, make use of the 20% discount currently on offer for this two week long event packed with carefully curated content linked to flowers, botanical forms and specific colour palettes.

The fourteen artists participating this year have recorded lessons for this summit. We’ve edited these into easily digested daily portions and packaged it up neatly with subtitles (English and Spanish).

Once released, you’ll have lifetime access to all the lessons so you can revisit them in your own time and make art at a pace that suits you.

Click below for Early Bird registration at only £60.00 or $78.40 valid until 18 May when the first lesson is released.

Dip your toes... a BONUS weekend of warm ups

Before we kick off on Monday 18 May there’s a weekend of warm up lessons in that’ll be shared free for all on Substack

I’ve put together two fun demo videos where you will get some ideas for playing with no-pressure, sketchbook focussed creative processes. These lessons are linked to shapes chosen from this years weekly #coloricombo prompts.

The weekend bonus lessons are pre-recorded and will also become part of the summit’s content.

All the information

The Colori Flori Summit 2026 is now open for registration with a 20% Early Bird discount available until the first lesson is released. Dates are 18-31 May, find out all the details here.

Colori Flori information

If, like me, you avoided world affairs last week, there were a number of other interesting articles in the news including two irregular occurances.

The first was that the month of May has two full moons, the Flower Moon on the 1st and a rare Blue Moon on the 31st. Both of them were also micromoons (the opposite of a supermoon) where the moon appears smaller to us as it’s at it’s furthest point from Earth. This phenomenon happens only once every two and a half to three years, the next Blue Moon is in December 2028.

Also in recent news was the announcement from Kew Gardens in London that their titan arum was officially in bloom, one of the rarest moments in the plant world.

The titan arum is also unkindly known as the corpse flower or scientifically Amorphophallus titanum, which roughly translates as “giant misshapen phallus”.

Hailing from Sumatra, it’s the world’s largest unbranched inflorescence (where multiple flowers act as one) and can grow up to eight feet tall. It stores energy in a huge underground stem called a “corm” and can go for multiple years before blooming for only a few days.

When it does, it emits a smell likened to that of rotting meat in order to attract it’s pollinators like carrion beetles and flies. It also produces heat allowing the stench to travel further. Apparently it’s a sight and a smell that needs to be experienced!

The titan arum flowered for the first time outside of it’s native Sumatra at Kew Gardens in 1889, and when it did it was illustrated by today’s featured artist, Matilda Smith.

Smith (1854-1927) was born to an English family in India. Her second cousin, Joseph Dalton Hooker, was the director of Kew Gardens who employed her there to train as an illustrator when she was twenty three.

Interestingly, she had no artistic training and no experience in botany whatsoever but showed herself to be very skilled!

In 1878, shortly after her first drawing was published in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, a dispute over outstanding monies between between Hooker and the magazine’s lead illustrator Walter Hood Fitch caused Fitch to leave the magazine. Smith took over responsibilities and by 1898 was appointed the first official botanical artist of Kew Gardens.

Between 1878 and 1923, Smith drew more than 2,300 plates for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. She was especially admired for her ability to create credible illustrations from dried, flattened, and sometimes imperfect specimens and was the first artist to depict New Zealand’s flora in depth, creating 1,500 plates for the monumental Icones Plantarum.

In 1921, the year she retired, she was named an associate of the Linnean Society - only the second woman to have achieved this honour. She was also recognised by the Royal Horticultural Society and had two plant genera named in her honour. At the end of the Victorian era, Smith had changed what was possible for women in botanical science and art.

Read more about the titan arum from Kew Gardens here and follow them on Instagram here. You can read more about Smith here and here.

“Amorphophallus titanum”, watercolour and ink on paper, Matilda Smith, 1889

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Brown Red, Banana Yellow, Pistachio & Deep Peach. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish

W18 Shapes

186KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

I’m thrilled to tell you that the Colori Flori Summit is returning this month and registration is now open.

From 18 to 31 May, thirteen hand-picked artists + myself will be sharing our favourite creative tips and techniques. A comprehensive selection of processes are covered in the lessons including painting in watercolour, gouache, acrylics, painted paper collage, acrylic markers and pencils and printing in mixed media. See how professional artists, illustrators and designers explore florals and botanicals using limited colour palettes chosen from past #coloricombo prompts.

All the info

I can’t wait to share the projects with you, this event will once again be a lot of fun. You’ll be enthused and inspired by this wonderfully diverse range of lessons all in water-based media.

How it works

One lesson releases each day at 9am London time. They’re pre-recorded, so no paint-drying moments, no waiting around. Most run about 30–35 minutes and are subtitled.

You’ll get lifetime access, which means you can watch at your own pace, come back to lessons whenever you want and create without pressure or deadlines. One signup. One payment. That’s it.

There isn’t a ‘free’ option for the summit and you won’t drown in content without adequate time to actually make anything. Everyone who’s contributed their time to the summit is a professional artist and is paid - their work matters and so does yours.

The details

The summit runs from 1-18 May. Early Bird pricing is open now, until the first lessons starts. That means £60.00 or $78.40 for everything (full price £75 or $98).

What you get: Fourteen exclusive lessons + bonus content. Lifetime access. A community space to share your work and connect with other artists. A full money-back guarantee if it’s not for you.

The artists in alphabetical order: Miriam Bos, Claire Desjardins, Tansy Hargan, April Howlett (Monkey Mintaka), Dar James, Katie O’Shea, Rowan Sivyer (Little Rowan Redhead), Janet Skates, Carrie Smith, Julie Sydenham, Betsy Walton, Clare Youngs, Estee Zales, and me.

You can see them all together with their lesson titles and Instagram links here.

All the artists

The artists taking part are all artists I admire for their own unique way of making and teaching. They’re people who who inspire me and who I wanted to share with you in this two week long event.

Early Bird registration now open. We’d love you to join us.

Our stay was made very comfortable by our hosts Tim and Madeline and their staff at Hotel Leone. The food was delicious, and our setting in the hill top town of Montelparo was rather spectacular.

My first art retreat for 2027 have just been announced, it will happen next February in magical Marrakech in Morocco. Read on to find out more.

Magical Marrakech

Whilst in Italy I was gifted a beautiful set of handmade watercolours made by A. Gallo. This particular set contains colours picked for the region of Le Marche. The pans are handmade with a high pigment concentration using a honey-base with gum Arabic and are works of art themselves.

A. Gallo watercolours

This week’s colours are picked from a watercolour painting on a postcard where I used combinations of browns and blues to mix my favourite hues for shading.

Contributing subscribers can scroll down to the end of this post to see the 35 minute long video I recorded of the mixing process.

Colour sample on a postcard, watercolours, Esté MacLeod, 2026

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Cerulean Blue, Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber & Ultramarine Blue. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. If you enjoy this weekly dollop of colour and creativity please share this post with others who might like them as well.

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.

W17 Shapes

448KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Marvellous Morocco

Join us for a week of colour, culture and creativity in Morocco. I’m very please to announce that my first retreat of 2027 will be in Marrakech from 27 February to 6 March.

Once again I’ll be working with the wonderful hosts Harrison and Katel of Perigord Retreats where I taught last summer. We’re swapping the medieval villages and lush green hills of the Dordogne for a beautiful villa set in an olive grove just outside Marrakech, with views stretching toward the Atlas Mountains and the Agafay Desert.

More about Marrakech

For Contributing Subscribers

Here’s a 35 minute video of the mixing process using the A. Gallo watercolours to create this week’s artwork.

Read more

Before I tell you about Leopardi, I need to share that the lineup for the second Colori Flori Summit, which takes place from 18-31 May, has been announced. The focus once again is botanicals and florals and each of the fourteen participating artists uses a limited palette chosen from Coloricombo. Find out more here.

All the details

Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) was an Italian poet, writer and thinker who was born and raised in the small provincial town of Recanati. He was a gifted child, a prodigy who was tutored privately and spent most of his time in his father’s extensive library. Immersed in classical and philological knowledge, by age sixteen he had mastered Greek and Latin, translated Homer and had written enough to impress actual scholars. His physical health was poor though: a spinal condition caused chronic pain and his eyesight deteriorated, eventually causing blindness in one eye.

In 1816 something changed and Leopardi stopped doing scholarly work completely and started writing poetry - he phrased it as the passage from erudition to the beautiful. He started with poetry deeply influenced by classical forms before developing the style he’d become known for: lyrical poetry exploring nature, memory, childhood and unrequited love. L’infinito written in 1819 describes his yearning to travel beyond the confines of Recanati and to experience more of the world which he had studied.

He published his first collection of poetry, the Canzoni, in 1824, followed by a the Canti in 1831. While both were well received, they weren’t particularly successful and Leopardi struggled financially. He had left Recanati only to drift around Rome and Florence looking for opportunities that never quite worked. He died in Naples in 1837 during a cholerea outbreak, still with a modest reputation.

After his death that changed. His works were ‘rediscovered’ and and ranked alongside those of Keats and Wordsworth. Leopardi is now considered the greatest Italian poets of the 19th century and one of the major figures of European Romanticism.

It’s fantastic what you can learn from a street sign! If you’d like to read more about Leopardi’s life and legacy click here or here.

“Leopardi: Poems & Prose”, book cover, 1966.

Colour Combination

Colours this week were taken from a book cover and are Grass Green, Parchment, Signal Red and Warm Grey. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by Leopardi’s original handwriting of L'infinito.

W16 Shapes

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