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| Nine fish from Your Personal Wish Book by Lilian and Jennifer Too. |
After some freehand-drawn works, I returned to my coloring books this last weekend, this time picking up a lesser-used book, Your Personal Wish Book by the Asian geomancer Lillian Too. The illustrations are by Jennifer Too, probably a relative.
The challenge tossed by the two Toos (haha) was to render the nine fish (carp?) on the page in vibrant reds. The Chinese say that the word for fish, yu, sounds like the word for excess, yu. The number nine is no accident either. It is a symbol of longevity.
I used my box of 72 Derwents for this one. It had several shades of reds, from the deep cranberry to pale orange. I picked a combo of three to four colors for each fish - a red, a paler red and a neutral (grey or sand) - in hopes the combo would work.
It was after I was done that I realised that I should have played with shades within each fish, as each body would be thrown in shadow in parts and gleaming bright white in others. So it was a belated effort, an afterthought, to render some parts of the fish with an overlay of mid-grey.
It was a conscious effort to keep the flowers and floating lotus leaves in pale pastels so the fish would pop.
This piece was done under less-than-perfect lighting, so does not bear up well to a closer inspection. Some parts of the scales were imperfectly colored. (*Embarassment*) For this, I blame the lighting in our living room on Saturday night. My presbyopia didn't help any!
Towards the end, after the nine fish were done and I was onto the flowers, I was losing patience, and did the rest of it quickly, so it's not one of my best efforts.
