Chanel

Chanel
Acrylic on canvas. 12" x 14".

 An attempt at painting a Shih Tzu. This is my niece's dog, cooling off on a tile floor in Rio.

I limited the colors to the three primaries- Cadmium Yellow Light, Cad Red Medium and Ultramarine Blue. The floor was laid in as a mixed orange, then scumbled over with a blue and white mix, toned down with orange added. I washed over the tiles in the back with a thin layer of raw sienna to drop the intensity and push them back more. I had hoped for more orange tones to bleed through, but didn't pull it off.
With more time, I would have worked the tiles more, soften some of the edges and beef up the different fur directions. But in general it came out okay. I was told it looked like her.

Rework of Cat 28

Rework- painting over Cat 28.
The original painting (below) was done in 2013.
I could not locate the shot I had worked from, so I found a few similar shots, and worked from those. The only area that didn't get reworked were the books on the desk. My father built that desk in the early 1960's- and I still use it.

Rework of Cat 52

Rework of Cat 52
The original (below) was done in 2013.

A few angles and proportions changed, some hard lines softened, and neutralized some colors. I think this works a lot better,

Rework of Cat 53

Rework of Cat 53.

The original (below) was done in 2013.

This is classic awkward Oscar in a weird, stiff position. I really liked the colorful quilt and hesitated painting over all the fussy detail, but couldn't take the visual chaos.
 I made adjustments to angles and proportions within the cat's body shape, and dropped the saturation/intensity of the colors. It's much less confusing to look at now.

Rework of Cat 55

Reworked painting of Cat 55.
Oscar bathing in the corner. The original painting (below) was done in 2013.

I made major proportion and angle structural adjustments to everything, and desaturated the colors to more neutral tones. It would have worked better if the paws had not been so close to the canvas edge- a little more open space down there would help relieve the visual tension.
I thought the one leg pointing at the lower right corner might cause a composition problem, but the edges of the walls seem to pull the eye back into the center. At any rate, its an improvement (I think) over the original. .

Rework of Cat 14

Rework of Cat 14-
The original was done in 2009.

reworked older paintings- Cat 19.

Reworked paintings

 I have been trying to convince myself to toss out a substantial stack of older paintings which  just didn't work well for various reasons, and make more room in my work space.
 I couldn't bring myself to trash all of them, and started reworking some to see what I came up with. Here is Cat 19 reworked-

 (The original painting is below)

This has really caught my interest, and I have since resurrected other paintings (#5, 9, 10, 14, 18, 19, 20, 28, 47, 50, 53, 55). I recall struggling with these trying to make them work, and getting pretty frustrated at the time.  Years later it is gratifying to be able to identify the problem areas, come up with better solutions, and see some progress!
Some were simply bad compositions. Most commonly I did not give enough attention to proportions and angles, and tended to oversaturated colors competing with each other. And a disturbing "cut out" hard edge look.