Zinnias in a water bowl

I did another study of zinnias from my front yard but this time I tried to show the stems in water.  This was hard to do, and I looked at a number of other artists’ paintings to see how they did it.  I think that one of the tricks I learned was to paint the surface of the water in the bowl first as an ellipse, then to paint the water in the bowl and the glass reflections.  After this, I painted the stems stopping them on the water surface.  Next, under the ellipse I painted the rest of the stems.  The water does distort the placement of the bottom stems some.