Exercise - A rose(or maybe a poinsettia) by any other name

It's nearly Christmas so I chose a poinsettia.
Studies in pencil and coloured pencil:

Then inspired by the great botanical illustrators I tried watercolour.

The underlying drawing wasn't too bad,

but I'm not very happy with the finished painting. It gives you an appreciation of proper botanical watercolour, I'm too impatient for watercolour and struggle to achieve a balance between control and letting go. I added ink to try to bring it all together.

I'm more comfortable with coloured pencil but still not good at realism. The green leaves were just about ok but the red ones are a bit fuzzy. Below, here's a more sketchy version with ink and liquid watercolour using a fountain pen, dip pen and water to move things around a bit:

I quite like this version and I think that it feels like a poinsettia.
To make it easier to be less detailed I drew my plant again with oil pastel:

I like the texture on some of the red leaves here, but not all, and I've drastically overworked it so I did a minimalist version.

This is maybe a bit too abstract. (also, randomly, it reminds me of an early 20th century artist, but I'm not sure which )
I drew the red flowers with the dropper that came with the watercolour ink.

This is the sort of impression I want to convey with my illustration. I added some colour with photoshop.

I haven't got another dropper so I drew the green leaves with a stick dipped in the ink then moved some of the colour around. I don't like this version, which is why I haven't dealt with the background which has cockled. It's too washy, too uniform and it's lost its punch.

I went back to my photo of the dry image and added flat colour with photoshop.

I should have done this before I added water to the original drawing, There are some errors here but I think that I might be the only person who can see them. I quite like this version.  Should I have drawn the stem of the plant? and the pot that it's in? is that too much detail? and what about the background? The professional botanical artists favour white but it is quite stark. I tried some Christmassy variations.


Probably the black works best. I wanted something bolded confident but the plant is already bold and confident and I don't want to make things too busy with lots of colour.

Actually I could play for hours with different colour combinations but I'm not sure that it's good use of my time.