Thank you for those hints. I'm really unhappy with the result (wish I'd never even started it but I will leave it there as evidence for my failure) and I didn't know where I was going with that image. I started with a face and a hat and then just kept adding stuff without really knowing what I was doing. Now I'll wait for inspiration to strike and I will not try to create another image without inspiration (or I'll go back to practice basics).

A challenging task that is. Here's what I've got so far:

I REALLY liked the brown forground a lot more than this blue one. It changes the whole image to have such a warm and earthy color grounding the trees, and I quite liked it!

Why not use the blue for detailing the front trunks like in the painting? I'm enjoying your exploration of this whole subject, keep it up! c:

I tweaked the palette some more, pulled down the saturation on some colors, made the grays neutral and fixed some brightness issues. Then I changed around some of the colors(giving you back the brown which you liked) in the tiled trees but that's where I'm abandoning that image before starting to detail it like the painting. I had already started detailing the front trunks in the first version but I removed all of that again, because I then would have had to detail the other trunks as well and that would have become nearly impossible under the chosen restrictions (also, the image/composition is too boring to fix and I'm thinking of redoing it completely from scratch with less 2D-ish trees(those are especially obvious in the tree tops, which should actually appear like viewed from below instead of the side view they are in) and more curved trunks).

Another attempt at a painting I also abandoned. The brushes and my skills are not up to do the fine details necessary to make that work at that size. Also, this time I had chosen a really heavy (200g/m?) coated paper meant for inkjet photo prints and the problem with that is that the watercolors don't hold easily on it, due to the coating and it's impossible to paint color over color on that paper because upon applying the next color, the one previously applied dissolves again, leaving unfixable white holes in the painting and the brush just ends up pushing the color away instead of it sinking into and staying on the paper. Another problem is that the pencil lines, drawn for planning what goes where, are too strong and they show through the paint. This whole painting was a rather frustrating experience.

Dennis: Ever done Spectrum pixel-art? Cause your paintings *and* that palette remind me a lot of a less saturated, more painterly spectrum-ish style.

No, I've never done any Spectrum art. Maybe the Spectrum engineers took inspiration from some standard paintbox as well.

Excuse my crudeness but these are fucking awesome! Makes me want to try it myself, would you mind taking a picture of the brushes you used? I can't remember the last time I did watercolor, probably art class in the eighth grade. Also what kind of paper would be ideal for watercolors?

Thank you for being so crude.  These are the color+brushes I used. In the top magnification are the ones used in the last painting. The ones in the bottom magnification I haven't used yet. They look like pretty standard brushes to me and they all came in a set of 15 brushes. All together I think I paid 7 Euros for the brushes and the colors. Those are my first watercolor paintings since probably 14 years ago. As for an ideal paper, you'd probably want "the heavier the better" because when it gets soaked with water it deforms a bit (gets all wavy and stops being perfectly flat). I'm currently using only standard plain office printer paper (80 g per square meter).