This is actually pretty beautiful! I like the way background is blurred, so nothing's interfering with observation. I don't really see much of a problem for "larger lights and darks"? (except for maybe the flowers?) Maybe in your mind the bug needs to have a more defined light and shadow shapes? Would painting a plain "white matte material" help in this case? because those structures are quite thin and the light/shadow shapes on that is gonna even be thinner. I can't think of a way for it to look very defined unless it's drawn huge, or have interesting patterns so the light doesn't matter? I think for flowers you could maybe draw a sharp and dark core shadow just for the sake of light/dark separation, and then when you painting it you fades that out so it won't look too out of place. Currently the bug and the flower seems a little bit like cut and paste, not much occlusion going on but I imagine in the real life it won't cast much of any shadow either. Maybe, you could add some very bright reflections on the body of that bug? Just on the underside, what I found out is that even you have a little reflections, it shows the interactions of light and it seems to unite the image. (No need to be metallic bright actually, just more Fresnel)

this might be embarassing on my end but i did not register this as a painting at first i thought you only uploaded a reference photo

Hey, @Dan B! A challenge indeed - lots of details and complex lighting stuff going on. Your painting looks nice, and it certainly shows you dedicated and put a lot of time into it. I’m not an expert in color and light (I’m much more about line, gesture and design), but I do see a few things I believe I can point out, and hopefully this will help you. By the way, sorry to be catching up a bit late with your post! I painted over your artwork (please see images attached), and here are the key points I considered as I did it: 1) Separating value ranges for distinct areas in the painting. For example: background = mostly light with low contrast; flower = around midtones, no extreme lights or darks, a little more contrast than the background; and wasp = full value range, from lightest to darkest, with high value contrasts wherever needed, considering the lighting. 2) Giving a better read to the areas where the silhouettes, shapes or forms felt a bit confusing. Mainly, the wasp’s legs (they needed to contrast more with the part behind them) and the “inverted cone” of the flower (sorry for my lack of botanical vocabulary) behind the wasp’s head (it was creating tangents with the wasp's body). What these two major topics mainly concern is value - specifically, how to organize the values in the composition and create contrasts in a way that favors the subject you’re painting. When I was learning this stuff, I remember I got a lot of benefit from the “Basic rendering” series at CtrlPaint, especially its Part 3, which covers value, texture and reflectivity. Here’s a link to the series in case you’re interested: https://ctrlpaint.myshopify.com/collections/foundation-skills Besides that, I also thought of a few extra adjustments on the painting: . Adding a cast shadow from the wasp’s legs on the flower to help create better form definitions and more interesting shapes there; . Making a few changes to the angle of some of the wasp’s legs in order to have more variation and rythm (rather than having them be parallel); . Un-cropping the wasp (no extremities touching the borders of the image) - the composition feels better like this to me personally, but sorry if this messes up the wasp's anatomy, which I know pretty much zero about; . Darkening mildly the upper right corner of the painting - I felt that the light values there were competing with the focal point, and having slightly darker corners could also help bring the eye towards the center of the image; . Adding a blur effect on the areas farther to the wasp’s head and upper body. I though of this as a Macro photography, which often operates under super selective focus - just a very small sharp area with even close things already becoming to get a bit unfocused. I did this very softly, not like a Macro photo, but just to create some more depth and help define the wasp’s head and body as the focal point even more. I did it with the Gaussian Blur filter in Photoshop, but if you could simulate this effect through your brushwork, I personally think it could look more interesting and elegant. . Finally, a few global value, hue and saturation adjustments just to make everything come together. And here’s something I didn’t get to do, but honestly couldn’t find why not to either: add the wasp’s other wing farther behind the existing one. As I said, I don’t know much about insects' anatomy, but I do understand that the visual qualities of their surface bodies is usually quite complex in terms of light: various different textures, often reflectivity, speculars, sub-surface scattering. Plus, since most of us aren’t used to looking at them up close like this, it becomes a whole new world when we attempt to draw or paint any of these little things with such level of detail. Nevertheless, if we try and look at them through the lens of some basic art techniques such as gesture, structure, composition and the laws of light, we can be able to tackle drawing or painting them just like we would any other larger being or object. Not easy perhaps, and could take some training time, but definitely possible. Besides the CtrlPaint series I mentioned above, I’d also recommend checking out this course by Sam Nielson at Schoolism, I think it could be very helpful for the long run: https://schoolism.com/courses/art/fundamentals-of-lighting-sam-nielson I guess that’s all I’ve got today. If you have any questions, please let me know. Kind regards and best luck with your art!

Hi Dan! First of all I would give the wings a little more 'texture', they are transparent but not invisible. The sections of the veins are not totally flat, they are slightly convex, thicker at the edges and tapering towards the centre, so try to suggest this using the reflected colour of the sky and the colour of the flower, with some glazing (if you look closely at the reference photo I think you'll see what I mean). Another problem is the head, which seems to be cropped against the flower behind it. Try moving the flower upwards so that it protrudes from above the head, to accentuate the overlap. Also, the exoskeleton parts, including the legs, should receive some reflected light from the flowers. Try a little bit of desaturated yellow, a bit warmer, that way you should give it a bit more volume. The shadow of the abdomen seems to be the right shade, while in the other parts of the exoskeleton you have made them much lighter, flattening these parts. Also the end parts of the legs are too flat, especially too similar to the colour of the flower. Maybe in the photo they are partly covered with pollen (it's a type of cactus, I think... they release a lot of pollen, very fine, which sticks to the insects' legs) but it shouldn't be so uniform. Make the legs a slightly more reddish yellow and then cover some places with this pollen colour. Also look carefully at where they rest on the corolla, I think some should be partly sunk between the petals or pistils, to give less of a clipping effect. I hope I have been helpful :)