About nice pictures, bad ideas and flowers...

Beautiful flower, isn't it?. Sunflowers are one of my favorite flowers, usually the bigger the more I like them and these red ones just took my breath away!. I've been waiting all year to see them bloom again and paint a couple of them, like I did last year. So, a couple of days ago, I decided for this image, took out the pastels and got started. The problem? its not going well...I don't know if its because the paper is too small (I usually work larger pieces than this one, 10"X10") or that I haven't been able to find the "soul" of the image... probably a mixture of both. Whatever it is, its not working. So, I'm stuck in the studio layering and removing pastels for a couple of hours until my hands are all black and wrinkled and nothing comes out! That's the problem with pretty pictures: it's very easy to get lost in the beauty of the image in front of us and forget to look for what's behind the obvious... I guess I'll keep trying until something happens...