It's all about the fish

Back in work after the weekend and a few emails to catch up on - several requests for replacement or new ID signs.
One was for Arabian killifish - Aphanius dispar dispar, which due to a small shift around in the aquarium, have moved into a new and bigger tank display. The ID sign that was on their previous display was not for being backlit and was a smaller size than the rest of the aquarium due to the attributes of the tank it was kept in. It also had another species which did not move with it to the new home. So I transferred the relevant info to the bigger format on the computer, printed and trimmed it to size and put it up in the afternoon in the lightbox above their new home, with my colleague's, Anna, help once again on step ladder duty.

In the afternoon I met Mike, from the maintenance department, also in the Aquarium, to discuss the positioning of the board (for the ID signs to go on) that is to go with the new display for the goodeids. I had cut a foamex board in the morning to attach below the tank on some lovely half log cladding as a temporary measure until the proper board was cut, painted and attached to the stone wall. Mike had a heavy workload due to Easter fast approaching and being the start of the "season" everybody wants everything up together - Ship shape and Bristol fashion, naturally; so I wasn't expecting my little board to get done before Easter. However it seems that as it is a small job he may be able to fit it in, so I hung off putting up the tempoary measure until maybe later in the week when, if the proper board is not ready by then, I can go back to plan A with the temporary board.

The Sulawesi quail doves moved out of their temporary winter housing in one of the empty monkey huts near the lake and up to the outside South West Avairies, so their ID sign was brought out of the filing cabinet and put up on their new home.

Late in the afternoon I got down to my next illustration, which is of a flagtail characin - Semachilodus insignis. I transferred the pencil line drawing onto the piece of watercolour paper I painted black last week.


I thought about how I would approach this illustration for quite a while as it is a silver scaled fish reflecting many colours so the question was .... do I paint the body dark and then in a pale colour paint in each individual scale adding all the colours individually..... or do I put colour washes over a pale base colour to get all the reflected shimmering colours and then outline each individual scale in a darker colour to then go back and add high and low lights on the scales to make them "sit into" the body. After much consideration on how long and how fiddley each way of working would be or not be I plumbed for the latter approach and managed to get a good pale base coat on before it was toime to go home. This will dry and harden over night nicely so that it is more robust to paint over tomorrow without too much danger of paint lifting as I apply more.