Obsessed with Koi

Jean Janssen is a local watercolorist and one of my best friends.  She has been teaching for many years, at community centers,  the Universify of the Pacific, and privately.  Many of her paintings have won blue ribbons throughout the Central Valley here in California.    One of her best selling themes are koi.  She has developed her own palette and technique.

One day Creative Catalyst sent a promo for a watercolor video for  an artist she had heard of but had never seen his workshops.   I showed her the prmo and she was so excited, he used a slightly different technique.  We ordered the video. I watched it first and OMG I was excited too, knowing she would soon be trying out his techniques  and adapting them into her own style.
Well, that got me kind of hooked on koi, but in acrylics.

Not long afterwards Creative Catalyst offered a video on painting koi by a different artist in a totally different way.  So I ordered it to and we compared them and had a lot of interesting discussions about the techniques.   

I had recently restocked my acrylic paint supplies, and I decided to paint koi myself.    Mostly because some years ago Jean had given me 3 canvasses that she didnt plan to use. I had painted over one but had two left.  When I dug them out, I found she had sketched several koi on one  in pencil.  She decided she didnt like acrylic paintings so had never done anything with it. 

Well, there were those koi.   Hmmm.  First I thought I would collage them,  but instead collaged a background of old maps from an atlas I use as a paper source.

Then i played with sketching koi from internet koi sources.   I kept three of Jeans original koi, but did the others based on my sketches.    Layer by layer, tweak by tweak gradually it came together.

I remembered reading about using Citrasolv to clean acrylic paints and inks from brayers, so I wondered if I could scrub out some fish shapes from my dark water background.  It worked. Just as Jean and these other artists could lift watercolor paint with a damp clean brush to bring out their fish, I could do it with acrylics.  Only instead of water, I needed a product to scrub away the layers of paints and glazes.  I tried using alcohol first but wasnt as successful  as using the Citrosolv. 

As the first fish began to emerge, I felt like I had really accomplished something.  It took some time and heavy scrubbing and some judgement to decide when to stop and let it be.    It was so much fun.  I think I am now obsessed with koi. 

The painting lives above my bathtub.  Here are some pics.  You will notice I collaged and then stained and painted over some of the fish.