Oil Painting Progress Post #2

I nailed down a good composition, however, I decided to change out the "doohickey for the wooden cylinder to make the painting easier and take quicker. We are working on a grisaille undercoat and are trying to capture value, so so far its been a lot of things coats and going back over things.

My first pass through with everything covered in paint, so far the forms are there, but there isn't enough contrast between the values(3/4/25)

After some retouching, I feel like the back candles got closer to the correct value, but everything was still too close in value(3/4/25)

My final pass through of the day, I feel like the contrast got a lot better, but now some parts are a bit better, however, the candles look good(3/4/25)

After one more day of retouching, I managed to get the forms to be sharper and the values of the background to be closer to reality, overall, I'm proud of what I have so far and can start glazing with color soon(3/6/25)