A Koi painting project - work in progress notes

Hi friends,

third stage

I have a project I am working on.  It is fairly large, so it is occupying my easel for a number of weeks.  I work on it a little at a time.  I just put on New Age spa-like music and go into a zen kinda mood and I work on this.  This piece is my escape from the world and meditate kind of thing.  No pressures, no show I am planning for it....just pure zen painting....

I started with a whole bunch of photos I took.  I drew fish shapes from these photos in the scale I needed, and cut them out of scratch paper.  I also cut out lily pad shapes, and water reeds too.  I moved them around my pastel paper (it is an orange colored gritty paper) until I got an arrangement I liked.

first stage

Then I traced their shapes with a pastel pencil.  Then I began with hard pastels, doing light layers in the background and using different dark colors layered over each other.

second stage

Then, when I got the background values about right, I had to decided what colors the fish would be.  So I started putting a light layer of the fish colors in.

So this is the stage I am at.  I'll show you how it progresses in about a week.

third stage