Koi

All I can say is man, this one has my blood, sweat and tears in it. You cannot imagine how many studies it took to get this one to work. The central idea was that the magic of seeing a koi break through the water should be captured by the koi actually breaking through the paint. In other words, the body of the koi should be physically bursting through the paint medium, pushing it aside. My thought was to draw or paint the fish and then do a solid wash over them that they would burst through.

To get this to happen, I had to find a waterproof medium to color the fish with. So initially I painted them with water color and then covered them with wax. That looked terrible. Also I had to discover what kind of paper to use. A flat non-textured paper was needed.

Many studies later, I happened on Sean's collection of Berol Prismacolor pencils. They came in all the colors of the rainbow and excitedly, I hurriedly drew the koi. I taped the paper to my desk to prepare it for the watercolor wash and did the black wash. It totally covered the fish. I was disgusted. All my hard work went to waste. I waited until the paint was not runny and ripped it off my desk in anger.




Thank goodness I did not ball it up and toss it out because as it dried, the wax pencil cracked the water color paint on some of the fish. With the help of some gentle scraping with a palette knife, I was able to see the fish I had colored on the hardest and that had the most wax pencil deposits. So, I scraped harder on the other fish and am overjoyed with the final result. Click to enlarge.