Salvaging an Earlier Mistake

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Hey All, if you've been reading my posts for a while, you may remember a series of posts that I did about painting a portrait of my friend's cat named Taz (the cat, not the friend). That painting took a VERY long time, and a lot of the delay was caused by the challenging background. As a matter of fact, the painting you saw was not the first painting I tried to make of Taz. I originally started a painting in the landscape (horizontal) orientation, because that was the same as the reference photo, which had a lot of stuff in the background. It started out okay - I got a good sketch done on the canvas, and I started blocking in the base colors of the background. But as I said, I got really bogged down trying to figure out how to approach the background and set the painting aside for a very long time. I FINALLY realized that it was a portrait, after all, and the subject --Taz--was the most important thing in the painting. So I redid the painting in the portrait (vertical) orientation, cut out a lot of the unnecessary background, and finally made a successful finish. The earlier canvas sat around the studio for years. I didn't want to throw away a perfectly good canvas, so I figured I would paint over it, at some point. That point finally came last month, when the pub where I show my art had a call for submissions for surrealist art. I had an older drawing that I eventually submitted for the show, but I was inspired to repurpose the old painting. Since it was going to be surrealism, I could make up any weird background I wanted, so as you can see, I have made a good start painting a strange background with fluffy clouds on a blue sky and kind of a desert-scrub look on the left side, which disappears behind the cat and is a more open area on the right (I'm probably going to paint water on that side. The green shape behind the kitty is going to be an orange tree. Stay tuned for further developments!