My watercolor: Lotus flower, step-by-step

I've really missed realistic painting, so now I've started again! A simple subject: my favourite flower, the delicate and graceful pink lotus. I hope you like it!

I used Sonnet watercolors on 300 g cold pressed watercolor papre.

I proceeded with the painting layer by layer. After sketching, I started with the background choosing a dark background to make the light-coloured flower stand out.

Here, the edges are still imprecise, I corrected them in the last phase with some fine contouring.

I dampened the petals one by one and used a stronger, but otherwise very pale crimson and crape varnish colour at the tips, with a small amount of Indian yellow and golden ochre at the base of petals.

The finished painting:

Here are the details of the finished painting:
I used a darker colour and a thin brush to draw the veins of the petals.