less is (way) more: lessons from "big paint"

next steps: big paint

i got a little too enthusiastic with the background on this one and in my opinion made a bit of a mess of it. i think i can do some scrubbing and fix it to a certain degree, but it seems i constantly need to remind myself that in painting "less is more" is almost always a good dictum. much of the problem here stemmed from making my tie-ins from figure to background with paint rather than just bleeding the edge with clear water to lose the edge into some potential space around the horses and adding the background later after i was sure that i knew what i wanted to do. the other glaring thing that i see is the background under the belly and chest of the horse is warm which is making it advance against the cool of the shadow on the horse. i either should have made the horse belly warmer...perhaps reflected light using yellow ocher?...or made the background cooler. that would have made the background recede and the horse advance. i will try lifting off the brown madder wash and putting down a cooler greenish wash...like oxide of chromium....which i used in other places for the desert prairie.