Exercise: Fish and leaves

In this exercise we had to paint simple shapes with a minimum amount of detail and brush strokes as possible being  mindful of the shapes that seemed to work better than others.

I found it harder to achieve satisfactory result with each fish that I painted than I did with the leaves, perhaps you can get away with more random marks when painting a leaf.

Tried to keep the brush will loaded with paint, felt this stops me fiddling, if I pause for to long adding the bottom fin to the fish I may end up depositing more paint than I want.

In the second part of the exercise I decided to stick with the fish shapes, better able to judge in my view whether shape is successful or not, certainly happier with the fish shapes produce second time around... getting better with practice and some therapeutic about painting the same shape again and again.

When attempting to wash off the fish shapes I was surprised how difficult it was to remove the paint, the shapes remained visible although slightly faded despite putting the painting under a running tap and at the same time rubbing into the shapes with a paint brush.

The end result, I am left with a faded shapes which have kept their original form. Painting fresh fish shapes on to the same painting give a sense of depth, with faded fish in the background, this work better on the side of the painting that includes the wash, possibly because the wash helps with the feeling that the fish are swimming in water.