Fish Studies: Exploring movement through drawing, watercolours and ink.

I set myself the personal brief of capturing the fluidity and movement of fish. I decided to use a local pet shop for reference so I took my sketchbook along to do some studies of their various types of goldfish. 

 

I was also interested to find out how I would illustrate their transparency using my watercolours, so when I got home I added colour to the sketches:

I wanted to recreate the sense of life my initial pet shop drawings had and so it was suggested to me that I work at a very large scale and draw with very fluid lines. I used India ink and a large paintbrush on A1 (ish) sized card to produce new, very large, fish drawings:  

 

I experimented on some of the large scale ones with coloured inks, before altering the black ink lines in Photoshop to add more colour:

  

I then wanted to see if I could simplify the fishes' design so I restricted myself to only a few lines:

One of the tutors at my university wanted a photograph of my ink-fish obsession for the blog, and got me to lay them out around the studio! You can get a feel for how big each piece actually is!  (Click for a bigger view)

After photographing the large ink drawings, I printed them at A4 and A3 and experimented with my watercolours on top of them:

I found that I wanted to add colour to the whole of the image including the black lines, so I used Photoshop to add colour and after scanning in some separate watercolour textures, brought the two elements together:

I was now feeling like I was getting closer to a more polished outcome with my ink designs. I then completed a series of compositions and patterns to show the finished fish designs off:

I played around with other colours too; such as these reds for the moors, but I found they weren't "watery" enough in comparison to their blue versions.