Stop and smell the (yellow) roses

Things may have gone a little wild here. I had a plan. I covered the whole surface with yellow at first, and went ahead wiping out highlights and adding shadows. Which resulted in a rose-looking yellow flower. But it lacked something. So I added splatter. Wrong move. I scraped some areas. Eeek, even worse. I got frustrated and put the painting away for a while.

When I came back to it, it still looked bad. So I wiped most of the painting off and reworked it completely, with bold brushstrokes and exaggerated color. This is the beauty of a failed painting: it's already bad. You are unlikely to make it worse, and you might just make it better!

And hey, from a few feet away, it does look like a rose :)