Whenever I need to deal with perspective I opt to roughly model out the scene in Blender.
Blender is a free open source program for 3D modeling, animation, editing, and more! It's not the best for everything, but it's more than enough for what I need it for which is very basic modeling.
Modeling the scene in 3D really helped me save time to have the correct perspective and scale. Plus I find it super fun. It's like playing Sims! I also like how I can turn the scene around to find a good angle and composition.
The Process
Once I found what I liked I just took a screenshot of the scene, and pasted it into Photoshop. Then I went in and designed everything inside the scene - the pen holders, books, plants, etc.
I skipped the value structure part because I have pretty clear idea of what I want the scene to look like - the light source comes from the lamp to light up Relaxol, and everything else will be darker.
The Struggle
The color part is where I struggled the most. I want to stay away from my comfort zone, which is essentially blue/violet and orange/pink combo. After a million color adjustment layers, I ended up with this color palette which is composed of aqua pink and yellow.
The Animation
I didn't end up recording the animating process because I'm not comfortable with animating AT ALL. I think I might have to speed the recording to 1000x speed just to make sure viewer don't fall asleep watching me redo all the time.
When painting the scene, (I learnt this later) it's best to keep in mind what do I want to animate as early as possible. That way I don't have to separate EVERYTHING, and only make sure the moving objects are painted entirely whether it's covered by something or not.
For this scene, the plants and the biu bius are animated and the process is rather easy. For Relaxol I tried frame-by-frame animation again. I think I got a liiiiitle faster!
That's how I painted this scene! I really like how it turned out. Print for this painting will be listed soon! And in the meantime enjoy this lofi video on me and my partner's lofi channel