Three Orchids

I am on a roll and am continuing my study of orchids, my favorite flower, were it not for all the others. Here's the original photo and my work up for the painting:

I didn't want to reproduce the photo as is, so I photoshopped it to something closer to what I wanted to do. This included cropping, changing colors, and changing shapes:

This was looking closer to what I wanted to do for the painting.  Started right in and here's the first session:

Three Orchids #1

Of course, there's a long way to go.  The leaf colors are pretty close to the ones in the photo, but the background is blue right now to identify the background areas. I'm not sure that this will be the final color, but it works very well for now.

Three Orchids #2

I'm happy with the progress so far, which is unusual. If I can keep myself from wading in with some drastic change, this painting might actually work.  Big question will be the color of the surrounding leaves, such that they don't compete with the flowers over much.  But, next step will be to do the other two orchids.

Three Orchids #3

I think that for now, anyway, it's going well.  I have to fill in the other two orchids, though, to make sure that they balance out the painting properly.  Then I can work on the rest of the foliage.  Thinking that the center is a bit too stripy on the left side, so might fix that in the next round by darkening the lightest of the sections on the left. For some reason, the rest of the discussion was erased and rather than try to reproduce the thought process, we end here.

Three Orchids #4

Three Orchids #5

Three Orchids $6

The final version of the painting...