Bareback

This is a combination of a fantasy idea with something real. The real part comes from a photograph of a running horse from near Little Big Horn. The fantasy is to put a couple on the horse, riding bareback. I am not a horseback rider; so this is pure imagination but it's one of those passionate imaginings that pleases me even if it doesn't happen to be realistic. What is the point of art if not to go beyond what is realistic?

I learned something with this one as I had been unable to get satisfactory digital detail into faces when they were small like they were necessarily with two figures, a horse and a sagebrush backdrop. By resampling it 300x what it was, I had faces I could work with. When finished, I resampled it back to a manageable size for the hard drive.

My shock came when I looked at what I had saved and it looked like it had before I had started with the enlarging to work. It lost all that 'painterly' detail. So I started over, enlarged, used the tools that worked better at that size and this time, I saved it with higher resolution, something I hadn't done before. Then I reduced its size and it left most of that detail. Small will never totally get past the problem.