After very very very long hours of overpainting, here's the *almost* final result. Now what's left to do is some Photoshop magic to get rid of the darkest darks and increase clarity in general.

This was very fun but above all I've learnt so much about workflow - for example, I could have gotten rid of my many layers much much earlier because it's so much easier to overpaint over everything. It also eneded up being the most complex image I've ever made and figuring out what lighting and materials rules to break for composition and clarity sake was an essential part of it. I feel it looks quite convincing overall tho!