Fixing up the Red Poppies watercolor

I have a small file cabinet where I keep my watercolors organized.  Looking through it the other day, I discovered an incomplete watercolor landscape of red poppies from 5 years ago that I filed away:

I liked what I started, but it just needed some extra work to make it complete.  To improve it, I softened the hard edge where the poppy field meets the sky:

I added the rest of the poppies.

When I didn’t see anything else to change, I signed it using a dip pen loaded with the same turquoise colored paint I used to paint the poppy stems.

I like signing my watercolors with watercolor paint now instead of using a sketching pencil because the pencil always seemed a little out of place.

To flatten the watercolor painting, I tried to take a shortcut by steam ironing it. It flattened it, but it was warped at the edges so I ended up having to flatten it the traditional way with the board and gummed paper tape which worked very well!

Since I stink at painting in a straight line, the borders of the watercolor were pretty skewed. I used the poppy field horizon line as an anchor to level the painting and then drew guidelines to trim the painting down so that it can easily be framed in the future:

The finished watercolor which is now listed on Etsy:

Painted using Windsor blue, permanent rose, cadmium yellow and burnt sienna on 140 pound coldpressed paper.