Ice cream in crystal ice-cream bowl (acrylic painting)

Hi friends!

Today I want to talk & show you haw I painted this picture to the next art contest to Golos.
Contest's theme was named Freshness.
Who can resist the portion of a delicious creamy chocolate ice cream, decorated with fresh strawberries and sprinkled with chocolate chips?
Especially if there is a terrible heat outdoors...

I chose this my photo as a reference.
I think, it's very successful due to the beautiful pronounced light and shade and glare on the bowl.

Materials: some colors of acrylic paints, two brushes - №12 (bristle) & № 6 (synthetic), acrylic medium and watercolor paper with fine-grained texture.

Сonstruction sketch (with more clear table surface)

I mixed ultramarine and burgundy paint to make background, trying to make it uneven with lighter and darker (shadow) sides.
Light falls on the left (sunny, warm), so a shadows will be cold ...
For wooden surfaces I mixed brown, scarlet and canary-yellow paints.
Foreground has made it more saturated and dark than a background.
In some places I painted stripes imitating a fibers of a tree with heavily diluted brown paint.
And since the paint is thick, it also scratched a light fibers on the wet layers with an other end of the brush.

The next step was an imitation of transparency on a bowl.
To do this, I very much spread a paints with which I painted a background and a wooden surface, and put them on a corresponding parts of a bowl, casting a bet on a pattern of a crystal grooves.
Then I outlined a shadows on the creamy hills of ice cream (made them light lilac, closer to blue).
While very weak.
Acrylic - opaque paint, never late to strengthen the details ...

The time to paint a main delicacy!
I mixed brown and ivory and painted chocolate pieces of ice cream.
Shade of my brown paint is cold, so I added it more in a shadow and less to a lighted areas.
Then I painted berries with red (light areas - with a mix of yellow, and added some burgundy to dark ones) and dot with yellow color - these are seeds.
Don't forgot about the bowl! In some places I put red spots, where strawberries should lie behind a glass.

And, finally, the most difficult step - crystal ice-cream bowl and its facets.
I thought very long time, with what color to draw crystal?
Finally, by mixing white with a drop of ultramarine and an even smaller drop of black, I found a suitable steel shade, which, being strongly diluted by a medium, produced colors more or less similar to glass edges.
Saw to the ref, first I did a darkest edges.
Moreover, on a influxes of a base of the bowl, a darkest areas were on an illuminated side, and on the bowl itself - on a contrary, there were more dark edges on the right - these are a refracting and reflective properties of glass.
And then I painted absolutely intuitive!
Small edges in a middle i painted in accordance with a lighting, a closer to a light edge, a lighter gray shade was chosen; on a shadow side added more sharp dark edges.
On both sides I just put some chaotic points, because there a drawing is the most distant from the viewer and therefore fuzzy.
I also added red-yellow reflexes from a wooden surface to a lower part of the bowl and their a little to a small upper edges.

Important: when drawing objects with complex lighting it is necessary to look at the picture from a distance from time to time - this way you can better see all the flaws or the most successful places!
Used to this technique, I saw that a shadows on an ice cream were too sharp here and there.
And also the fact that a bottom of the base does not have a volume.
I made a shadows on an ice cream softer with a slightly diluted white paint and a drop of yellow.
Finally, small details remained - a crumb of chocolate for ice cream (painted with brown and sometimes black).
Adding tone on an ice cream bowl, touching up a shadow, if necessary; glare on strawberries that came to light, and all a bright places - on ice cream, on chocolates (all the same mix of white + yellow in varying degrees of concentration).
And the drop shadow from the bowl, certainly!
Here I switched on my imagination, because in the photo it is cropped.
I chose the same mix of ultramarine and burgundy, added warm shades (wood color) and drew a translucent shadow, repeating a contours of the bowl in a future, darker at the base and then fading.

Here I got a creamy chocolate-strawberry-crystal freshness!)))

Many thanks for attention to my tutorials!

Have a nice lucky and creative day!

Regards