by Mick Edwards

Your painting is well "drawn" and the horse has energy and movement. but the back ground is competing with the foreground. You could make the background recede, by either blurring it or reducing the contrast and intensity of colour or both. A thin glaze of blue grey over everything in the background would help. You need to preserve your high contrast for the major subjects. To make animals come alive, it is usually best to have a little reflection in the eye, regardless of whether or not you see it in a photograph. Hope this helps.

The only advice I can offer is practice, practice and more practice. Quite a coincidence isn't it? I also live in Leicestershire - Lubenham, just outside Market Harborough and with same name - and was a guest lecturer at De Mont. Uni

Thanks for the advice Linda, the painting is one I did for a friend who provided a photo,he wanted it 'as per the photo' Told him the background was too busy but in the end I did what he wanted. I posted it here expecting comments along the lines of yours, which echo my own thoughts. I was my first attempt at painting a horse and I wanted to seen if I had it about right. Incidentally I had more trouble painting the many straight lines than doing the horse. :-)