The source of all flowers is a stunning manuscript page.

April 7, 2022 10:50 AM

At Islamic Illumination, UK-based Saudi artist Dr. Esra Alhamal hosts the annual Golden Flower Art Challenge! See everyone's completed flowers on Instagram! This year's floral templates are inspired by Mughal manuscript borders. Previous templates included Turkish plates in 2021 and Safavid Iranian textiles in 2020. And, as Dr. Alhamal says, have a creative Ramadan!
posted by spamandkimchi (8 comments total)

Don't usually do Social Media. Was looking at the Instagram link for "everyone's ...flowers", scrolling down. Then the page locked and said I had to login (or login to Facebook) to continue.

Was a surprise to me (see above). Guess I won't be looking at Instagram links anymore.
posted by aleph at 12:47 PM on April 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

aleph, ugh you are right. It's impossible to scroll through the whole set without an Instagram account. I opened the artist's post showing all the flowers in private window/incognito mode and was able to at least look at that single post. Try that maybe?

And as an apology, here's a Youtube video about the Golden Flower Challenge from 2019. (At least YT doesn't make people log in...yet)
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:27 PM on April 7, 2022

This is really lovely thanks for posting it! I enjoyed looking at everyone’s different results starting with the same template.
posted by SpaceWarp13 at 2:58 PM on April 7, 2022

Gorgeous
posted by clew at 3:44 PM on April 7, 2022

No problems spamandkimchi. It was a good post, my peculiarities notwithstanding.
posted by aleph at 4:11 PM on April 7, 2022

Instagram has been preventing non-'grammers from looking for awhile now.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:30 PM on April 7, 2022

"Instagram has been preventing non-'grammers from looking for awhile now."

Probably about the last time I clicked on an Instagram link. :)

Stopped looking at Twitter links when they recently blocked non-javascript viewing of the links. If it seems important enough (and it's non-media) I'll fire up Nitter for them but that doesn't happen often.
posted by aleph at 6:40 AM on April 8, 2022

These are lovely, and I would never have found them myself. Thank you for this post.
posted by rpfields at 11:41 AM on April 8, 2022