I changed the background to a light green on these two new floral paintings, but I still was not happy with them. So I mixed a pale greenish yellow with a lot of gloss medium, and painted over the background yet again. This color worked much better, but then after spending so much time on the background, I felt I needed to work with the foreground again.
I felt the contrast between the orange and red petals in the first painting was too stark, so I worked to tone down the red with more light red and red orange. I kept working to bring out the petals from the background and to get them to coordinate better with each other.
The final step was to draw rough outlines of all the petals. I used cadmium red deep to outline the petals on both paintings.
Now I think I'm finally satisfied.