Seagulls WIP, brush strokes

I did a silly mistake at the beginning by drawing the whole grid on the canvas. Usually I only draw the dots at the grid's intersections as they are enough to copy the drawings with accuracy and they disappear under the paint. The grid lines instead show through most colors and that's really annoying, but hopefully they won't be too obvious in the end.
I've actually seen paintings around where the lines are still visible, and usually you don't notice them unless paying close attention since they tend to get lost in the overall impression. I leave some of them visible on purpose in my pencil drawings but I don't like this too much in paintings.

So far I've used only the restricted earths palette, which now is up to six colors as I've found the Sepia I was looking for. The final colors will be different in some places (some bags should be almost cyan) but I'll shift the hues and adjust saturation later. For now I just try to match as closely as possible the color I want in each area using only the six available tubes.

Painting a convincing mountain of trash is not going to be easy... it seems there are a few common conventions that illustrators stick to when drawing or painting such places, I'll write a bit about them in the next post.

This is the first time I pay real attention to the brushwork too. Before I was too busy trying not to make a mess and lose control of stuff. Among others I'm studying the brushwork of Degas, Frazetta and Leyendecker, and the bags here owe something to the latter. I don't like the way he painted figures but for some objects and plants it makes very cool textures. Degas's handling of colors is probably impossible to imitate in acrylics though...