Inspiration...and then what?

I haven't been very inspired to paint lately...but then, as I was coming out of church last Sunday I looked down and saw these!

Beautiful red tulips! We usually see tulips from the side - we recognize their familiar shape. Looking down their throats gives a much different view. Maybe I would paint them like this!

I sketched out a few of these flowers.
I wanted to try to paint loosely so I began with 'wet on wet.' That is, I wet the paper and began to drop on color. A few dashes of yellow to highlight the centers and it's a mess.

Recently I have been looking at ink and watercolor sketches on line  - the line defining shapes and the color washes adding zip.  I tried adding some ink lines...

With all that messiness I could barely see the lines. I thought they needed to be more prominent. I got out my matchstick and ink and made the lines heavier. (Explanation of matchstick and ink - take a wooden matchstick, shave the end into a point and use it like a pen, dipping it into ink and draw with it. It's a heavier and uneven line - kind of interesting.)

I also added a little more color to it. I love red and blue together, but tried to go greener. It's not getting any better.

However, I carry a phrase in my head that repeats itself when I get this far in an experiment... "It's only paper!"

The next step was to just wash some of that mess off... and then I literally threw some paint at it!

Okay, so now it's really getting horrible... I put a few darks back in...

...and decided that I had played with it enough.

So, I stepped back and really looked at it. Was there anything I liked about it? Maybe that one tulip at the top on the left hand side.

SIMPLIFY!

I sketched one tulip...

I inked one tulip...

I painted one tulip...

I finished one tulip...

What I learned...sometimes I just have to get all that preliminary 'stuff' out of my system so I can paint the thing that inspired me...

An addendum: I took photos of this process to class. One suggestion was to add more darks to the original 'mess'...

It still doesn't work... I'm framing the single tulip!