@Natali Santini What you have is wonderful. This may be digital but your approach is traditional. Its the hard path but it will pay off in the long run. You're building form by limiting yourself to thick brush strokes and being selective with your colors to build. You've done your composition sketches. Great job. I noticed your values a bit off. I took it upon myself to load your image into Rebelle 5 and try to show you what I see rather than try to explain it. With value the colors your use do make a difference. So when you look at my edit just keep that in mind. I may not have used the colors you would have used, and for that I'm sorry, I've now become kemon, the destroyer artworks. Creating a focal point or points can be done in many ways but the main idea is in how much contrast is being used and where. Contrast isn't just in value. its in warm colors vs cool colors. Its horizontal lines vs vertical lines, its round lines or shapes vs straight lines or shapes, sharp vs blurry. You get the idea. In my edit don't pay much attention to my brush work, this is a learning process for me too. But take note with how I lightened some of your darker colors and darkened some of your lighter colors in the napkin. I added more highlights in the cake and adjusted the colors in the shadow. Your black parts on the cake I'm not sure what you're going for with that. looking at the rest of the picture it doesn't appear like you wanted a something like a 4 or 6 tone picture (I didn't count) but maybe you do? I took a guess that you were going for something like that style and left the black alone. I would think that even eliminating gradients you could do a 4 tone picture without black and still make the icecream cake stand out by reducing the chroma or saturation on all the surrounding hues. If you want a "warm" picture then most of the forground or 75% of the painting would be any color that is warmer than your background 25%. Your picture is mostly pinkish if you don't want to make the background closer to blue you might want to dilute the pink towards a gray. And that green stuff on the plate should have a hint of warmness in the lighted part. I cant be sure how you should go about it. Thats up to you. But If you take a look at the gray scale version of your original work I want to point out a couple things. Your napkin has 1 stripe that is the same value as the background which hurts the readability of it. The contrast of the napkin also messes with its readability. If you're stuck on how to approach changes to the napkin look no further than your coffee cup and spoon. Your table cloth pops to much as well. Your cake is great I love the colors but looking at it in terms of values in the gray scale see were the shadow part of the cake meets the napkin it's too close in value that's where the cake and the napkin almost look like one object. same with the cherries...I think they're cherries. the ones on the side. Nothing wrong with the value, it's just hard to tell what it is. In my edit I through some highlights and shadows on them to give them form. Same with the spoon or fork on the plate. It kind of looks like you have a shadow on the red (cherries) as far as value goes it works but if it is a cherry it could use a highlight. Not bright white but a slightly lighter red. The fork/spoon shadow is a very dark. It too could use a highlight. The gray scale in my edit look at the napkin it almost blends right in to the background and same with the coffee cup and spoon. But notice how the colored version of my edit you can clearly read the shape without it taking more attention then the ice cream cake. The cake and the napkin ain't blending into one object. There probably wouldnt be much of a shadow being cased on the napkin from the cake either. Anyway I hope this was of some help. Simply just wanted to share the application of concepts. not Tell you how your painting should look. If you take what I showed you about value the contrast of your napkin could be higher then my version and still work, as long as it doesnt compete with your focal point. Same goes for everything else. The less contrast the farther the object falls into the background. I repeat myself here because If you have something that clearly should be in the forground but the contrast is as low as something that would be miles away it never ends up receding into the background, instead its just a blob of color that's out of place.

Your initial digital sketch is a great start especially with the values. I think the darkness of the frosting made the highlights on the cake stand out more when you switched to color. However, I agree with @Christopher Beaven with regards to the color. To me it looks like the reds of the tablecloth are fighting for attention. As for the napkin placement, you can maybe try putting it on the left side where just half of it is seen and maybe the cup as well. Then you can turn the teaspoon in the cup to left so it points towards the cake as well. Good job so far. The overall feel of "sweet and delicious" is there so thanks for making me hungry :D

I think it's a great start. I like that you using diagonals throughout the composition. I also like how the spoon in the tea cup is pointing toward the cake in the last drawing. The spoon on the tray is doing the same. The only part that I'm not so sure about is the napkin stand. If you can adjust that so the folds are the napkin point towards the cake as well that would be fantastic. This way you will have leading line coming from three angles. You may want to be careful with the saturation of your color on the table and in the background as it will distract from the cake. You could possible neutralize them a bit further to help the cake stand out. The one great thing about the napkin stand is that in the last drawing it balances out the composition and keeps my eye from flowing off the top left of the picture plane. In the notan and the color sketch the napkin holder is not large enough to do this and the similar height between the cake and the holder is battling for attention. All in all I think this is going to be great. If you're interested I would highly suggest you check out The Society for Visual Storytelling. I went through their creative composition course and it was absolutely mind blowing. https://www.svslearn.com/ Hope that helps! Post the finished piece!