Sunday Morning Exercise--Watercolor in Echo Park Lake

I wanted to document the first couple stages of the process (done during class) in case I royally screwed up the next pass! :)

Alas, I completely overworked it in these next stages. I don't know why I added a thick, dark green line of diagonal foliage in FG and a plant that is too large/centered. Also, colors started getting muddy and paper was breaking down in spots....

However, I was determined to try to fix my mistakes and ended up using gouache in FG and MG (i.e., going over the thick line of diagonal foliage and trying to create some definition/separation between other elements), so I think I lost the watercolor luminosity that I'd been hoping for. How does one know when to stop and move onto something else (for better or worse)?

 In this pic, I cropped my painting (at the above stage) to a preferable composition:

 

Kept working on the whole thing though...because why not? Hah. I removed the plant and line of diagonal plants with a thicker application of gouache. Tried to apply what I've been learning about color vibrations from Angela for the FG with variations on yellow, incorporating subtle reds and greens for cohesiveness. Final version:

Ultimately, I prefer my first pass! :-/ Oh well, I learned something in the process of experimenting....