#5: A Riff on a Tahoe Tiger Lily

The actual size of this wildflower we found in Tahoe is about an inch and a half in diameter.  When I took the picture, I didn't realize there was a bug inside it, so of course I had to include it.  As always, there are parts of this I like and parts I don't.

Here's what I like:

composition is pretty good
colors are great
like the highlighting
I feel like I did a better job with shadows on the petals


And what I don't:
the interior of the flower is a bit messed up
There are water marks outside the leaves that I must not have wrung out my brush enough to avoid

Here's what I learned:

How to lift off paint to get the highlights

Not to stick with just aureolin yellow and alizarin crimson, but to introduce quinac gold to get more variation in the oranges

I'm doing a better job of figuring out how to slightly alter the values to get more realistic shadows on the petals

I tried to make the leaves fade more into the background by roughing up the their lines after I removed the masking fluid
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Hmm..  Not sure if I should've added more background leaves, but I felt because the flower was so busy, the background should be simple