Beautiful Oops

In my art, you can clearly see three koi fish swimming around a pond with water lilies. The story told is there is a variety of different koi fish getting long in the same environment. I chose to make this because my little sister always told me to draw koi fish either on a canvas, piece of paper, anything. But then once I saw the ink spots with this project I realized that it was a great opportunity to create something with koi fish and involve nature, since that is what I usually like to create. This relates to my life because I love nature and this is one of the many nature pieces I have created over the years.

My work was made by first sketching out koi fish using a photo reference online and then sketching water lilies around the koi fish I placed. The first fish I focused on was the one going up to the water lily, I then looked at the other ink spots and made them into koi fish. At first I had the top left ink spot as a water lily, but the piece looked off so I decided to make it into a koi fish as well. Once I had my art sketched out with a pencil, I went in with colored pencil to color in the fish different colors, the water lilies pink and green, and the water blue. To give the water more of a flow, I went in with oil pastels, first light blue, and added ripples in the water to give the fish motion. I then went in and blended the water with a white oil pastel.

The process of creating my art was first to sketch with pencil, then outline everything with a black pen, then I went in with colored pencil, and then oil pastels to give my art more detail and texture. My project evolved by adding more koi fish (three instead of two) so the piece looked balance out. After I added the third koi fish it even change the perspective to be more above rather than straight on like an aquarium. My next steps could be to add more detail I could use a pen to add scales to the fish so they could look more realistic. I could also go in with multiple different shades of blue to give the water a lot more detail and make it look more realistic. But I didn't want to take away from the koi fish so I made the water more simple rather than super detailed.