Tessie and Kloey

Tessie and Kloey
Acrylic on canvas. 16" x 20".
(sold)

It's been a while since I've produced a painting... life got in the way again this past year, and then I had "painter's block" on top of that.
I recently agreed to do a painting of two small poodles, working from a photo taken with a cell phone several years back. (Here I will whine a little: cell phone shot = less than stellar focus and color balance). Tessie is the chocolate poodle with a more reserved personality; Kloey is the more outgoing apricot poodle.

  I began as usual by trying to recreate the photo and pretty quickly abandoned that idea as many of the elements were not reading well as a composition. It's odd how elements can look reasonable in a photo, but look very strange in a painting.
Working with the strong tile grout lines dominating the image was more challenging than I expected as they continuously lead the eye away from the subject and off the edge of the picture. Trying to set them in correctly using a ruler to measure the perspective angles resulted in an odd perspective- it worked much better to just use my eye to determine the placement of the lines.
 At one point I had included the kitchen cabinets lining the background, but they added nothing to the picture other than visual clutter. The vertical cabinets also pulled my eye off the top of the picture and away from the subject. After changing the angles and heights numerous times, I gave up and got rid of  the cabinets, leaving an expanse of tile floor which became disturbing (look at the image with the solid blue rug covered up- yikes!) Including and re-positioning the blue rug stopped the grout lines from shooting off into infinity.
  The tile floor was virtually the same color as the lighter dog.  Adding an overlay wash mix of white, raw sienna and cadmium red, and a touch of ultramarine blue over the light tiles to darken them and push them back helped define the lighter dog.

I'm pleased with the textural contrast of the hard floor behind soft throw rugs and soft dogs. I also like the warm/cool tones repeating throughout the painting. Incorporating the blue colors of the rugs into the dogs helped pull the image together although I am still not satisfied with how I handled the dogs fur textures, and need to find a better solution. The dogs look a little stiff to me, and I did not work out how to make them look more fluid. In retrospect, I should have adjusted more areas of their contours to blend in more with the background values of light and dark to avoid the "cut out" effect.