I struggled with this painting, and am going to show some of the struggle. It is based off a photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash. My final painting is way down at the bottom of this post. I ended up essentially just using the shapes of the 3 doughnuts, and went off on my own, adding frosting to the top doughnut and ignoring the crumble topping of the bottom doughnut.

My first attempt in a side-by-side with the reference photo. This was just a fail — although I DID try the gloss medium mixed in with the yellow ochre paint on top. (Turns out you can’t mix it FAST; it will create air bubbles which then minimize the shine.)

The second attempt is below and I used Yellow Ochre mixed with white, and Raw Sienna (by Golden) mixed with white for the more shaded parts. Ultimately, completely unexciting, but at least the transparency (see above) was gone due to a second layer of paint. Last night, I watched a YouTube video by Marla Baggetta called How to Paint Donuts in Acrylic (I took her online acrylic painting course a few years ago, plus some of her pastel classes). Anyway, for the chocolate frosting, she mixed a touch of Dioxazine Purple with Burnt Umber so I tried that for this version of the painting. (In HER reference photo, the purple cast of the chocolate is easily seen, but I like the deeper dark the mix brings.)

Finally, here is the painting I am calling done. I painted over the above painting, using Raw Sienna and Burnt Sienna without any white. I added another coat of yellow “frosting”, and added a middle seam to the doughnuts, touched up the chocolate frosting, and then the highlights.