Seabirds and trash

 ...are going into the next painting. It's a seagull girl sitting into a dump hugging a friendly RL seagull. I'll decorate her with some terrible pseudo-raver teen fashion jewelry. The idea just popped up like that... amazing how "trash" and "dump" are among the first things which come to mind when thinking of seagulls, along with the beauty of the sea (on instead of it).
The drawing itself not yet ready but I have a good idea of how it should look like more or less. The colored stuff is a heap of trash bags which ironically sport beautiful colors at times. The confused dots at the top are a flock of seagulls storming the dump. The dark thing on the right is an excavator.

I haven't abandoned all the avatar and the feedlot ideas I wrote about, but I sorely needed more color practice before tackling them since they are going to be a lot more difficult than the latest paintings. This one hopefully won't take too long.

"I remember" done

The restricted earths palette is great, I'm already in love with it. It makes saturation and temperature so much easier to experiment with! I added only some cadmium yellow here.

I selected the extinct animals from the list on a precious but utterly depressing site: http://extinctanimals.petermaas.nl/

Here is a detail of the figurines: 

Starting from upper left they are:
- Baiji (aka Yangtze River Dolphin)
- Aldabra Warbler
- Po'o-uli
- Nukupu'u
- Christmas Island Pipistrelle
- Conondale Gastric-brooding Frog
- Partula snails in general (more than 50 species wiped out at once, one of the saddest episodes in the history of biology)
- Aldabra Banded Snail
- Alaotra Grebe

I tried to make them as recognizable as possible but I guess they show better in the sketches (the ones circled in red are the ones I used, except the frog which I improvised while coloring):

The one at the top (the Warbler) is actually represented belly-up, because for many of the animals listed on the site all the references I could find were photos of specimens preserved in some museum. Better than nothing though...