Enjoying the Match, Final

Enjoying the Match 18x24", $350

Here is the finished painting (I had posted the almost-finished version here but wasn't quite happy with it). The main thing I changed is that I removed completely the odd blue-man on the left side - the main thing that bothered me was simply that it appeared as though he were wearing the horse and rider as an over-sized hat. I tried moving the figure down and forward but could not quite make it work, so I made him invisible (as seen here). This allowed me to add a clearer version of the fourth chair on the left.

I also clarified the figure in red and added little touches of color here and there, amounting to a great deal of fiddling with the painting until I finally realized it wasn't making the thing better. Oh, yeah, I also added the polo ball (I don't know if it has any other name?)

An interesting observation I made while painting this one: I often see a painting similar to this, depicting slightly awkward, slightly stiff [and certainly stylized] characters and think, "that's cool." However when faced with a similarly rendered figure in my own paintings, I tend to think, "that's not cool." And I usually commence to "fixing it", making it more naturalistic, more realistic. Just an observation, and I suppose it depends on what the artist is going for in the end. Me? I'm happy with anything that works, anything I like - I just have to remember what i like.