Painting la Santa Maria: the swirl factor!!

Here are some photos of my continued studies of my dad’s Santa Maria boat model. In the studio, I started a very large painting on canvas focusing on a fragment of the boat. I am painting it in a particular way, which will take time, but I am choosing very carefully what will be detailed and what will be more abstract. I am using oil paint, and starting off by focusing on the sails of the boat (my favourite part!) .
I am enhancing the ‘swirl factor’, when I look at the actual sails of the boat I am just fascinated by all the little shapes, it is like staring at the sky for hours on end and noticing all sorts of little weird bizarre images and little imaginary figures. So when painting the sails, I got lost in my own little world of swirls , like I often do, creating all sorts of shapes that I wish to see (forgetting what the actual sails looks like).
I have only painted two of the sails so far, one of them almost looks like a leopard print or some other sort of animal skin. The other one, slightly more faded has a sort of breadcrumby and fish scale thing going on.. I painted even smaller more detailed swirls on this sail, using a specific blending technique: The brush is only very slightly dipped in colour, the key is that the brush should be very dry and a bit bristly with hardly any paint of liquid on it. I then use a swirly round motion to blend colours of black white yellow and brown together , making sure the brush is very very dry in order to create that slightly rough looking fady fish scale texture.