You could try a closer crop of the painting from the top of the cabinets down to make it feel more intimate. Just an idea!

I tried playing around with cropping on the reference photo, and I found that if the dog wasn’t midline in the photo (like halfway up horizontally) or if he was a larger part of the composition, it completely broke the feeling I was looking for of an enormous forbidden space with this hopeful doggo perched on the very edge of it. I was very surprised by how much the proportions affected the feeling of the piece!

In the end, I chose to extend the painting outside the frame of the original photo (it was an Instagram pic, so it was square) rather than cropping it down, and tried to bring focus onto the dog with detail work rather than size or brightness. He’s actually even smaller in the original pic, but I’m not skilled enough to render the expression on his face at a smaller scale. Instead, I punched up the reflections in the floor a bit to try and make it feel a little more exclusionary.

I may take another run at this painting to see if I can’t get the dog’s face a little closer to what I want.