Your painting is so great!

PRCC--Your use of shading is excellent, and most of the drawing is as well. I think the problem, and what gives you the sense that its "just not right" is where your drawing breaks down. If you take the lighter petal just to the right of the center of the flower as center, everything to the left of that line has one looking at the bloom straight from the top so to speak. However, everything to the right of that line is a view from the side of the rose. Actually, both "halves" of the drawing are spot on, they just don't belong together in the same flower.

Cake Club.. I'm sorry, As a florist what I see happens is at the end of the rose or outer petals seem to loose the pattern. Take the right side of the rose, the petals are going in a different direction. I believe it is from the angle of your brush or how you draw them on. Try imagining the flow of pattern by turning your head to the left and drawing the sequence of petals that way. Hope this makes sense.

Cake club comment: Painting on cakes is not my forte, although I'd like to get better at it. I think yours is very pretty :). Have you checked out the Craftsy class by Erin at Three Little Blackbirds? It's free and she is amazingly talented. I know you didn't want the whole cake critiqued but I want to say I think you have a good eye for color and design.

Cake Club review: I like the overall design of the cake and because I am NOT a representative painter, I am very impressed by the rose you did achieve. It definitely has some WOW factor. A few things that I think could be improved up with the cake is the smoothness of the double barrel tier and in the bottom tier where the fondant is sagging at the bottom. Design wise, i'd like to see just one motif of rose: you have three different styles of rose: the hand painted, the hand formed on top and the mold on the bottom tier. I think the painted rose is the most successful (very successful), but I could see it with perhaps a more vintage style molded rose, or a more botanical rose with shading. Nice work for sure.

Thank you for the advice. The right side of the rose is the part that I wasn't happy with, so these comments are definitely helpful. It's the angle that threw me off. I was trying to make it look like the petals were pealing back so more of the bud would be visible, but didn't know how to do it.
As for the bottom tier, I was originally going to leave it plain (like the top tier) but at the last second decided to change it...NOT a good decision!

Your painting is great; next time just use a picture of a rose as your guide for perspective.