Palette Knife Painting

I've just completed a painting I've been thinking about for a while.  I actually drew my picture on the canvas in late June or early July and hadn't gotten around to painting it until this week. 

Sorry for the not-so-great quality photo. I left my camera in Poland accidentally and all I have right now is my camera on my phone.  I have a friend with a "real" camera (as opposed to my point-and-shoot) and I want to try to get some more professional pictures of my art soon. ANYwho...
So I painted (most of) this with a palette knife (the exception being the background because I wanted it smooth in contrast to the flower and also the stem because I got sick of the palette knife).  My original vision for this painting was to have it a little more abstracted than it is, but I really do struggle with abstraction.  
Also, I had to do a lot of experimentation with mixing reds.  Red isn't a color I use a lot and I had a lot of trouble creating a very light value red.  I liked my dark reds, but lights were trouble.  In my reference photo, the rose was sitting in front of a window with light shining through the petals.  I wanted to get that bright, vibrant light value but I don't think I did. I think I got a medium red and had to compensate by making the other values darker than they were.  That is ok, but I still wanted that light value and I couldn't do it with out adding white and making it pink, totally wrong. If anyone has any suggestions for this, please leave me some comments! Thanks :)
My inspiration for this painting was a photo I had taken of a rose that was wilting.  If you've seen some of my other flower art, you might notice I like to capture flowers when they start to droop.  I sketched it and sort of scribbled it for shading in my sketchbook, and thought it would make a really cool painting.  I wanted the painting to be more like the sketch, but oh well.  I'm still pleased with the way it turned out. 

I liked the idea of having more straight and sketchy edges.  Maybe some day I'll try it again, perhaps on a much larger scale.

Finished Flower

I finished the small 3"x5" acrylic daisy!  I am not able to get a very good picture of it, I've taken so many and NONE show the background color accurately.  It's much more violet than blue.  The top left corner is straight out of the tube prism violet and the rest of the background is a blue violet color, not just blue. I wish you could see it in person, I don't love these photos:

 This one is too dark ^^^ and this one is too washed out vvvv

But you get the idea :) Meanwhile I'm still working on the watercolor and colored pencil daisies. I'll post pics of them when I'm finished!