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.

Current palette

I've matched as closely as possible the main acrylics palette and main watercolors palette I'm using so it should be easier to use watercolors as quick tests for paintings. The match is not perfect for the Brown Ochre and Venetian Red but close enough. I'll probably add an equivalent of Sepia to the acrylics palette too since it's fantastic for mixing low saturation colors and warm grays.

Master studies in watercolor with the palette above (plus a small amount of a primary cyan) and the original paintings. The studies are very tiny at 2-3 inches across. I'm not trying too hard to match the exact colors or shapes for now, I'm more interested in the way values are distributed across the picture and how I can use the limited palette to approximate a color scheme. But especially the value map, since the one for the feline avatar was screwed up.

Durer's other hare

The one who rented him the workshop rooms and sold him paints. Sometimes she also agreed to pose for him, as he seemed to have a peculiar fixation with leporids.

Having some fun to warm up after a chaotic month.

Besides the mannerism inspired to work of Durer's period the pose is a bit unnatural, but I had this specific pose and composition with the Celestial Globe so clear in mind that the all tests I did of alternative poses felt wrong - either the hare was too tall or didn't show the right curves. This happens a lot to me and I always wonder whether it's intuition at work or lack of observation. I admire a lot artists like Ingres who managed to harness this tendency to disregard anatomy and physics in favor of composition and yet produced very refined works.