Newbie Painter

Well, look at this, it's almost like I'm a regular updater.
Except we all know I'm not, so I must have scheduled these after saving up posts.
D: I know, it's almost like betrayal.

But, to the topic at hand.
So ages ago (last year) I had a room mate who is in the Army. Which was pretty awesome, considering how sick of Marines I get at times. But she was HUGE into thrift store stuff. And out in town here there are some pretty neat thrift stores. She'd always find the coolest things there. I was always jealous of her skills. It was like she secretly knew when there was going to be awesome stuff there.
Well she came back to the room one day with this picture she had bought.

 She knew I was into art, and crafts. She'd seen some of the things I had worked on. And so she asked if I would paint it for her. She even offered to pay me.
Like woah. I have dabbled in painting. At least I call it dabbling in painting. I just paint things to see how paint works and to learn. And by painting things, I mean nothing huge, because I always lose interest and forget to come back to it (Hence the previous post, that pillow is STILL not done).
Well I said I would, and I wouldn't charge, because I'm no pro. I dabble in everything that I do.

So I had some paints, but I needed more, and I needed to decide on colors, and think of how I was going to do this, because, yes, that is wood I would be painting on.
And I had to look up how flowers look.
I bought some paint from the Daiso (yes, I bought dollar paint, and its amazing). I worked on this for a few days.
Now granted, it took me MONTHS to start working on it. Mainly because I'm a procrastinator, but also because of how nervous I was.
Well it was getting close to Christmas, and during December I was going to Guam for exercise Forager Fury, and after that I was going on leave for a few weeks AND in January my roommate was PCS-ing. (She wasn't my roommate by then, she had moved to another room, but we were still friends)

So I wanted to give her what she had requested, and I figured it had to be before Guam or never.

Well I must say I am super proud of myself. She really liked it. I went with pink flowers because I love Cherry Blossoms and anything that makes me think of them. :D The background is blue shiny paint I got at the Daiso. My biggest issue was figuring out how to paint the background and it not look like a mess. I definitely had a lot of issues, and moments of panic during that time. But the rest of it was just remaining focused and remembering painting techniques I had learned through trail and error.
The way the design was carved in helped a lot, because on top of the shading I did the wood itself enhanced it, and probably covered any mistakes I made.
After I was done painting I had to go back through and carefully clean it all up. I had my moments where I said, "Screw it!" and just gobbed paint on, only to regret it ten minutes later.
Patience is a virtue. and it produces great things.