another 20 minutes

(5x6)

I always love paintings of koi ponds (and koi ponds themselves, for that matter) but think of the subject as one I could never tackle: too complicated, so much going on--the surface of the water, beneath the water....
I thought about what I said in an earlier post about using the 20-minute challenge to plunge into an intimidating subject and remembered a couple of photos I took on Tortola on an overcast day--which I thought at the time was not ideal but maybe turned out to be a good thing: fewer complicating reflections.
Coming upon a set of Lukas pan colors with the most luscious and inviting oranges and orange-yellows further helped me overcome my fear: I couldn't resist those colors.
So I started this with the fish shapes, no drawing, and painted the water around them; I was trying to keep the shapes separate, but the bleeding worked out well, softening some of the shapes and toning down the color so those fish look deeper in the water.

I've been pulling out old palettes and pan sets and tubes ... making abig mess, in other words. On the sheet below, I made swatches of all the quinacridones I have, and then tried a few random mixes, and came up with a couple I really liked: rose madder genuine + viridian; Q pink + green gold; cobalt + hooker's + gamboge; viridian + alizarin; and an old standby, raw sienna + manganese blue.