For the last 18 months, I've been having trouble with watching videos on youtube on my tablet via browser (the app is a joke of an adfest). Most of them will flash red and blue on 360p or above, so I have to watch them at 240p. Anyway, my mum's old Kindle Fire doesn't have this problem, so since she hasn't used it in years, I helped myself to it for watching videos. Anyway, the case ended up looking worse for wear. It started flaking all over the place, so Tiny and I had an ASMR-fest (kinda not really) and peeled all the paint off, and then I gave it a coat of gesso.

As usual, I had no ideas for what I could paint on it. Then scrolling through my tablet's gallery, I pulled up this screenshot that I took from a Chloe Rose video. I can't remember which one. But at the time, I had an idea of trying to copy it for practice.

To be honest, it was a pretty daunting challenge. If you've seen my art, you'll know that backgrounds and landscapes are my weak point (and creativity, and anatomy, and...). But I thought, maybe I can actually do it. Of course I knew I couldn't match the original, but I wanted to see how close I could get. So I started with a rough sketch, and started on the background.

I screwed up on the colour matching, so I had to paint over a part of the trees to redo the background, but the effect was actually nice! It's a shame I couldn't keep it.

At this point, I was sure that I was gonna mess up! Anyway, this was my palette at the end.

In the end, it did come out okay! I could have done a better job if I had a detail brush, but even my narrowest brush is quite wide, and the dotting tool was a useless waste of time. Here's a close up before the big reveal!

And here it is! The weird effect in the centre trunk is because I used copper paint for highlights, and it's just catching the light weird in the photo because of the hinge.

I'm actually happy with how it came out! There are a lot of things I could have done better (the shadows, the colour matching). I'm nowhere near the skill level of Chloe Rose, so I was happy that I was able to get at least a little close to her original.

Here's the tablet closed. I do realise that all the bending is going to make the paint start to flake after a while. I can live with it. I protected it with satin sealant, hopefully that will help it stay intact a little longer.

I wasn't feeling brave enough to attempt to paint the foliage. Which doesn't make sense, since the foliage would produce the green light, but anyway. Let's pretend it's a magical fairy forest in spring.