Still life with a cheetah skull

The still life was an exercise to improve rather technical skills in scultping, modeling and texturing, but I also experimented a lot with the artistic side of it, like composition and lighting. The main point in it was to make a reference to the famous Dutch still life paintings, which I absolutely adore. To make it feel more like in the paintings, I made every asset in the spirit of the XVII-century aesthetic; just some objects that might have been used around that time, elegant and time-worn. I've hidden a bunch of symbols here, referring to the passing of time, fragility, life and death. Good luck with finding them all!

Every asset in this scene was made by myself from scratch. Most of them in Blender, only a candle and a skull were sculpted in Zbrush.
Rendered in UE5 with path tracing.