Today is BleuPale's birthday! Apart from being my first mutual, I've found out Bleu is really quite amazing. She's probably the kindest person I know, she has done a lot to help me integrate into art communities, and has single-handedly shaped my experience here. I'm forever grateful for all the advice she's given to me, both about art and personal life matters, and I feel really, really fortunate to have her as a friend. <3

I wanted to draw something to honor her, a birthday cake, and since her favourite kind of cake is tiramisu, that's how we got here.

In particular, i wanted an elegant presentation of the cake, hence the golden fork and the square plate somewhat matching the cake's shape.

For the record, in the beginning the canvas was like a third of the current size; it was really zooming in on the plate.

I found the fork a bit difficult. The prongs are not super readable on this resolution, the outline has some jaggies, and the colors i used are a bit too green, as i'm realising. The shines are also not too noticeable, maybe i should've sacrified some luminance for saturation. (?)

As for the cake, i looked up a gazillion different reference pictures, since i didn't have that many ideas about how to make a brown cake interesting. I ended up being inspired into decorating it with some mint leaves and coffee beans, and i think it looks kinda dope! On the sides, the dithering helped me give it a spongy texture.

Then it was time for the background. I first tried with a green tabletop, but i wasn't convinced at all. So i thought, why not just draw the table itself? So i did! But you could barely see it was a table, so i thought, why not increase the canvas size? So I did! But then there was way too much empty space, so i ended up making a cup of coffee! with a golden spoon to stir the coffee, because i like to struggle!

And, to my surprise, the cup looks quiiite good! Which is ironic because it's probably the part I had to spend the least amount of time on.

(Look, PJ won't let me write a text longer than this. If you're so invested you wanna keep reading, you sure won't mind continuing on another site, right? So here's the full thing: https://cara.app/post/52079f92-c500-48c0-9fa9-e03e379b5d98  also if you're still here, that means you're the GOAT. Like wtf. Thank you for reading my silly words!! <3).