Joy cooked up the salmon I reeled in during my (almost) ill fated day of fishing. I felt really crummy the whole time in the boat because of the ocean swells, even though I took three dramamine tablets. But it was worth it. There is nothing like the taste of freshly caught salmon, especially the way Joy prepares it.

Today’s experiment

I was fascinated by the different shades of blue in a patch of the salmon skin. I didn’t quite capture the effect yesterday, in my experiments.

My original thought for today’s experiment was to focus on a single scale. Below is an enlargement of the area that caught my eye.

I’m not sure why, but the combination of pale blues, whites and darker blues in the photograph, suggest a mirror surface.

Below is my watercolor sketch based on the above photograph:

Comments:

Most of my experiments begin with a pencil sketch. In this example, I began by dampening an area of the paper in the shape of the leading edge of one of the scales and dabbing in a bit of turquoise. This did not result in the intended effect, to approximate the coloring in the photograph. I used Peacock blue for the darker areas in the scale.

If I could not represent the color to my satisfaction, perhaps the contrast between the scale and the dark surround would convey an essential truth of this little patch of salmon skin.

I used a combination of Payne’s gray and Black as outline for the scale and used the same technique of dampening the paper and dabbing in the color, to create the other scales.

The result is an abstraction of the photograph. Although I didn’t capture the mirror-like quality of the photograph, hopefully I ‘made visible‘ (using the parlance of Paul Klee) some of the essence of that part of the fish’s skin.