The other night I dreamed of finding tiny Holstein cows, and when I say tiny I don't mean like the Jack in the Box commercial for mini sirloin burgers,  with mini cowboys "herding cows the size of Schnauzers but they're cattle".  I mean tiny cows... like insects.  In fact I wouldn't call it a herd of tiny Holsteins, it was more like a hive, I could scoop ten or twenty up with one hand.  Teeny, tiny perfectly anatomically correct black and white cows swarming around!

Wondering at first if I was losing it, cows were now taking over my dreams, and not just any cows but bizarrely small ones until it occurred to me what I had been doing right before I went to sleep.  I have a commission to do a painting of cows on the beach, and my client has a very specific thing in mind.  Working on this involves carefully studying my hundreds of photos of Holsteins in search of the perfect cow composition to fit her vision, hundreds of tiny thumbnail images of black and white cows parading past my eyes.....legions of itty bitty bug sized bovine etched in my brain.  Makes perfect sense to me.

These are the first two studies for cows on the beach.  The cows are the only consideration here as I don't want to put time in working out the beach scene until I have the cows that fit my clients vision.  I do like both of these compositions however and suspect that I will eventually do large paintings of them sometime in the future.