Hi Barbara,
I can see you have done quite a lot on this painting and it does look much better. I don't like your new brown background which is effectively competing as a foreground against your portrait subjects. The background brown is more strident and chromatically intense than any brown in either of the two kids. For example, the boy's brown stripe shirt should not appear to recede behind the background. I would kill the intensity of this brown with a velatura like I have described in the thread on my painting Apotheoun (page 4)
http://forum.portraitartist.com/showthread.php?t=4136. It does not need to be much, a little goes a long way. You just want the background to be more atmospheric in perspective. It can be brown, but it has to be a quality of brown that relates well to everything else.
Hope this helps,
Garth
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