Magnolia Blossom acrylic portrait magnolia flowers

Well even though it's January, it is like we have perpetual Spring here, 60 degrees this morning, so for my tea it's porch sitting weather for me.  This coming week we are going to have nothing but clouds and rain and thunderstorms, which it is doing all of the above right now.  So looks like an inside day.
Not a real productive week, too much work and not enough energy (that's my story and I'm sticking to it). 
Dots is this week's project, the reference photo is from PMP and originally I was going to do the center dog.  Got him all roughed out with the shadow patterns, etc., and put it on transfer paper and traced it out on my drawing paper and was all set to go.  Then to my horror I discovered I wasn't paying attention and drew it reverse of the dog I wanted to use as reference, you can see the nose placement is on the wrong side.  As panic set in my first response was to redraw it and then I said "Buck up" this would be a great challenge for me to see if I could move away from copying exactly a reference.  So what I think I will end up with is something between the center dog's spot pattern and the shadowing of the one on the right.
As I mentioned last time I wanted to try to add color to my hair technique so I am approaching this conservatively and using colored pencils.   Doing the Dalmatian does two things, limits the color palette and also this is a short hair dog, so I can show less hair strokes and I think still get my point across.  I am using Staedtler black, because is hard lead and doesn't easily break it can really be sharpened and holds a point, since I am using a watercolor paper I am having to be sure to get a solid color to get inside the valleys with a sharp point.  Using several Prismacolor tones for nose and eyes.  I like the Prismacolor as the soft wax base gives a nice translucence and it's blendable just with pressure.  Initial spot pattern is being laid in and I'll come back with black Prismacolor to enhance and thicken randomly.
My other big problem is I can't really determine what the nose color should be.  It's not exactly a reddish purple, or a burgundy, but I think that's what I'll end up with as the base color, and squiggle the black texture over it.  Am going to try to be smart and experiment with which colors and how the layers are applied to get the right color off the final picture so I don't get any obnoxious surprises.