Sweet Angel

Number one son was asking whether I’d ever painted a fish. I think he was hoping to be able to give a fish painting as a present for two of his pescy (sic) mates. Looking back, the only fish I’d ever painted was a tiny one in Facebook, years ago. But I thought I’d rise to the challenge and have a go. I picked out a photo of a scalare or freshwater angelfish and tried putting it through the Notanizer app. The results seemed to suggest this fish would work well in three values, so I’ve painted it in posterised style using the trippy colour scheme.

There was no plantlife in my source photo but I thought I’d make things interesting by adding some random positive and negative reed shapes. I was hoping that these would give a camouflaged effect to the fish, with its black strips matching the water and its midtones matching the midtones on the reeds. And it worked. This was all deliberate for a change, not a happy little accident. Those midtones are an amazing chameleonesque match because those midtones are all a result of the same randomly coloured first wash. And when masking out the highlights, I also added some random starry/bubbly spatters and a signature.

After adding the final, French ultramarine, layer, I felt that there weren’t enough darks around the fish’s face and that I needed more darks for more definition. So I adjusted one of the sliders on the Notanizer app to see where I could add more darks. And after adding those darks darks and removing the masking fluid, that was me done.

I’m more than happy with this one. The eye and mouth on the fish give it some life. Although it’s clearly a fish, there are some weird ambiguities with bubbles looking like stars and reeds like flames. But most of all I like the camouflage effect. The fish blends into its surroundings as a result of the three implied layers (water, reeds, fish) all having that first layer of random colours in common.

A good job. I’m naming this one after a vaguely appropriate Jimi Hendrix track.

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