Barnie and Talia

Barnie and Talia.
Acrylic on canvas. 16" x 14".
(sold)

An attempt at producing a portrait, without being a formal head and torso composition.
It took a while to convince myself that I didn't need to show the face to do a portrait.

I really wanted to include the dog, and this seemed like a good set up. The composition was a little odd but the landscape had some interesting sculptural forms and lines. I liked the strong diagonals going on with the hills, tree lines, and pavement.
I'm getting more comfortable with landscapes and starting to get intuitive on how to build them, but inevitably run into uncertainties at a certain point and start over-fussing, and subsequently loose the spontaneity.
I was a bit lost on handling the grassy open field and tried various textures and splatters of different colors to build some textures without going all fussy with individual lines.
I experimented using a paint named "process yellow", a semi-transparent cool lemon yellow, applied as a wash over the predominantly green grass field and got some interesting results with that.  I never did find just the right tool to get the texture I was after, in spite of resorting to using an old tooth brush, and a stiff parts cleaning brush for tool. This will take more exploring to figure out.
A tough part was the bike wheels- my brain said they were round circles, my eye said they were ellipses. That was a battle.
Another sticking point was the edge where the grass met the pavement- I wanted more detail in the foreground, but the results looked too stiff and calculated and I removed it.

So, I'm really not sure what I think of this. It still feels unresolved to me.
Looking at it now, I wish I had reduced the contrast on the distant trees and hills and have them recede more to create a better illusion of depth, leaving the foreground in higher contrast to emphasize that area more. I do like the cast shadows in the foreground, and wish I had given those more space.