So cute! Nice work, @Karla Siejba! Looking at this piece, I’d say you seem to have pretty good observation skills, and studying drawing will probably be very beneficial to your painting actually. Drawing will help you better see, understand and design forms, and if you add some knowledge of light and color to that, you’ll see a boost in the way you handle painting as well. As a suggestion for the long run, I’d also say you could take some time in the future to learn more about composition too. This should give you more tools to go beyond the photo reference and start to play around with putting more of your own ideas and creative solutions on the canvas. Hope this helps! Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions. 🙂 Cheers!

Pretty strong work. There are some ways you could get the cats to stand out more. The lightest areas of the basket seem too bright. It might be that there is space between the wicker of the basket, but it could be distracting. Your dark areas could be darker. I think there is still some canvas showing through. One of the cats ears is folded? It might be neat to see it blocking the other cat partially.

This is a wonderful start! The first thing I would suggest is to gesso your canvas when working small with few coats. Sanding in between each coat. This will remove most of the texture of the canvas so it doesn't distract too much from the image. Or you can buy a panel with very slight texture. I wouldn't go too smooth though at some point the panels can get so smooth that the paint seems to slide right off. You can use canvas with a lot of texture but you will need to paint a lot thicker to fill up the interstices. When I first started out I used white in everything. Every single color mixture was 70% too white. This will get better with practice but a great way to see color well is to compare it to white right out of the tube. Or a white sheet of paper. Once you put something super white next to your subject you will see right away how far away from white the color truly is. Here is a cute cat image that looks like it has a ton of white in it. But then I added a big white stripe over the main parts of the subject and you can see all the color! I hope that helps! But one of the most important things you can ever do is to just be consistent with your practice. Keep working and your progress will be tremendous.