Man and Dog? Start of the Journey?

For anyone that wondered what happened to that square canvas below in which I had tried to do a more abstract sky/sea thing, well this is what has happened to it. I just wasn't happy and didn't know what to do but didn't want to waste that canvas as it is a really good quality (read relatively expensive) canvas. I had an initial thought about doing a male nude but as I am currently not attending any life drawing classes and could so NOT convince my husband to pose for that, I decided on a male figure from behind at a doorway, but not necessarily wanting to go through.

So after coming up with this thought at 10pm last night (just as well I had already done an undercoat, over the previous painting), I managed to convince DH to pose with jeans on. So there I am in the garage with the camera in order to get the right angle, yelling head up, turn right, turn left, feet together, feet apart, look wistful etc etc to my very patient husband at 10:30 at night, while the dog got very excited that his Dad was at the door and thought that something exciting must be happening (read, Food, Walk, Visitor - the external hopefulness of a labrador). I managed to snap about 30 photos until DH had enough (he is such a good man and I am the only person in the entire world that he would do that for) and then I was off to my computer to see what I had. When I saw that Connor (the dog) was in most of them looking so eager, I decided to keep him in and try and do a juxtaposition of the man not wanting to open the door and leave and the eager dog who can't wait to go. So I played around with photoshop elements with colours and tones as I want this to be a fairly muted brownish painting, but with the blue denim and the red collar of the dog being highlighted. You can see my wee reference photo in the photo of the painting. I also asked my dear dear husband to give our baby daughter her night feed so that I could keep on painting and last night managed to draw it onto the canvas and do the background wall before stumbling to bed. I've just done the hair now (babies both asleep at same time - YAY) and I am a bit concerned that the background may be too similar in values and colours to what the skin will be so I think I will do the back next and then look at whether I need to adjust the background. By the way, it is oil, on a 600x600mm canvas.

So a long way to go yet and not yet sure of title. It's something different for me (yet again) and I like the texture coming through from the painting that I painted over and I am going to try and paint the figure more painterly rather than realistically if that makes sense. If by any chance, I finish it by Monday evening, I might enter it in the current fortnightly challenge for the NZ Art Guild, which currently is Journey for the theme. However you also have to incorporate some type of thread, and I don't know if that will work for this particular piece. I do have a more abstract piece started already for this challenge though done in acrylic so I might just have to go with that one.