23 days, hanging in there

Starting to feel the pressure, I'm not as happy with this one as I have been with most of the others, but guess that is to be expected, I got really tired today, and I don't think my brain was into this one as much as it should have been, I was trying to keep from just doing landscapes, I had taken this picture at Meijer's (the local grocery/department store), if I could grow these, I'd have had my own plants but as it is I wanted to do some orchids and that's the only place that I could get my own photo's, so, they aren't the best, of course in the actual photo, my grandson was goofing around and sticking his face anywhere the lens of the camera was, I really wanted to punch this one up so I wanted a dark background, I'm not sure it really works this time, but I was too tired to think about it, I may change it out to a mid value if it moves me to do it, we'll see, for now, this is it, I pretty much jumped in with the pink making the shapes of the flowers, I was so excited to do this on that clayboard, but I'm thinking I should have done it on regular watercolor paper, I could have made the smooth transitions a whole lot better if I had, oh well, here goes, I laid in the shapes of the flowers with pink and then jumped in with blue and green for the background, obviously, that didn't stay, I tried to add some pinks in the background and it became too muddled up, so on with the darks, I started to fine tune the bottom blower first, I punched some darker pinks in and the yellow for the center, I pulled some of the color off the edges of the petals to indicate the light edge that showed up in the photo, it also fine tuned the edges and smoothed out the roughness, the center of the flower was next and I added the darkness in the pink by adding black to the pink (I believe the pink is either Opera or Permanent Rose, transparent, of course), then I moved on to punch in some vein lines and wipe out the center to indicate the throat, I do think I pulled that off quite nicely, then on to the upper flower, the one at the very top,I didn't get these flowers as large as i had originally thought I would, but I decided to add the opening bud at the top and one on the left side to keep it touching the edges, I used pretty much the same colors and proceeded in the same way, I wanted the one on the left to melt into the background, again, not an easy feat on this clayboard, the edges weren't white enough so I got into the gouache and put a line on the outer limit of the petals, I am still thinking about this one, at this point, it's not my favorite. Hope you enjoy it though, good night, this girl needs some down time, staying up way too late.