Gerbera Daisy

This is a new angle and much more detail to my last post (Shaded Daisy). This drawing used a lot of layers and overlapping. Both helped to achieve a unique perspective. For this drawing Holmes needed us to understand "how to create the illusion of layers so that parts of the drawing appear to be in front of or behind other parts"(64).

The process started with a small oval and florets I'm the middle. The book then instructed to add petals of different lengths and then added layers. This part was difficult because I felt the petals were not in proportion with the eye of the flower. They seemed either too small or too big or stubby in an ugly way. But I moved on to shading. Holmes instructed that the closer the petal is to the eye, the darker the shading should be (65). I finally added the stem to finish it off.

I was unhappy with the final piece. My obvious mistake was making my seed/oval too wide and not fixing it from the beginning. But one can always learn from their mistakes. I also don't feel my shading was very good. Both of those took away the realistic look and the illusion of it being 3D. What would you have done differently? What changes would you make in terms of shading?