Recent painting completed

Here's a painting I recently completed.  The client requested a portrait of her niece's horse.  She didn't have a preference on the background, so I asked about her niece's interests...besides horses.  She likes going to the beach, the color blue, dolphins, and Nancy Drew books, so I incorporated all those things in the painting, placing all of them in a beach setting.  I also put in little details that I thought would be fun, like a message in a bottle, written to the horse. 

I used my favorite paint, acrylics.  For this painting, I mainly used thin washes of paint built on each other, to create depth. 

Also, a note about composition...I created a triangle with the ocean and palm tree.  The horse is in the middle, and is the focal point.  I also made some visible brushstrokes, creating horizontal lines, across the sky to balance things. The treeline enhances the horizon line/balance, but nothing is perfectly straight, so the overall picture is relaxed.

You may wonder why there are no birds...I debated this, but decided to leave them out, because, while I wanted several things going on in the picture, I didn't want too much.  I also wanted the focus to be the horse, because that was the client's main goal.