This is my finished piece. I am very happy with how it turned out. My main problem is that I wish I had taken a better reference photo. I didn’t realize the problem until I really started to get into detail but some areas were a bit confusing as to what was going on, especially the stem of the wine glass. I kinda did a little guessing there.
I did have a lot of fun making this painting so I’m excited to share my process.
So I started by outlining the main areas of the painting and then I drew in the pattern on the bandana and blocked in the color there.
Here’s what it looked like with all of the main colors blocked in. At some point, I refined the more sloppily filled in areas.
Then I increased the size of the canvas so that I could look at my reference photo and my painting at the same time.
Here I’ve just added some shadows and highlights on the glass and the bandana. For shadows, I use a layer with the Multiply blending mode and for highlights, I used a layer with the Overlay blending mode. For highlights, I’m still figuring out which blending mode I like best. The ones I usually use are the ‘light’ modes and overlay and color dodge.
And then I hid the outline layer, painted the countertop, and redid the triangular shadow area as a multiply layer so that the counter pattern would show through. My next step was then to put the image back to the normal size and hide the reference photo and just work on making it look right without worrying about the reference. It ended up only being like 19 layers.