Talia & Barnie #3

Portrait of Talia and Barnie.
Acrylic on canvas. 16" x 12".
(sold)

Much earlier this year I was asked to do one more painting of the girl and the dog.
Shortly after starting this  I managed to tear muscles in my lower back, which was coupled with a severe pinched nerve in my hip. The end result was, I was sidelined from doing much of anything that involved sitting or standing longer than a couple minutes at a time.

Months later, I picked up where I had left off.
From the photo's provided to work from, I chose a an interior shot in a car with the brightly lit background and darker foreground, with reflected light bouncing off the interior surfaces. I liked this shot because the dog was in it, and thought the complex lighting might offer an interesting challenge.

I had to reinvent a lot of the forms around the perimeter that weren't included in the actual shot, and rearrange elements that were just plain unfortunate composition. The dog was in such deep shadow, there was virtually no detail to work with, and took some guesswork.

No matter what I tried, the painting continued to look disjointed. It finally dawned on me that I had ended up with areas of isolated colors, instead of integrating the different colors throughout the surface. Bringing the green of the vegetation outside the window into the foreground instantly helped to pull it together.
I'm a little disappointed with the muddy flesh tones in the face, but was not able to find a good solution. At one point I tried having the face in heavier shadows, and that ended up looking strange.

I came away from this thinking I need to push myself more to mix colors- I still have a tendency to want to use it straight from the tube.
The colors shown in the photo were not particularly engaging and in retrospect, a better approach might have been to keep the background elements more in a grayscale range, with the subject in more saturated color.