Underwater | Koi Fishes 🐠

Painting beautiful scenes like this can be interesting, I've always been fascinated by Koi fishes because of how beautiful they they look. Their colour pallete is so stunning, fiery red, gentle yellows, cool oranges and pearly whites. They mostly live in freshwater and are known to swim against the current.

According to my research and the pictures I saw, Koi fishes thrive well in clean ponds and well maintained water gardens surrounded by vegetation and a tranquil atmosphere.

Koi fishes are associated with Japan even though they originated from central China. They hold a special meaning in Asian culture and they symbolise good fortune, courage and luck. These fishes add so much beauty and wonder to the natural world even when they are hidden beneath the water surface.

I've had this idea in mind for a while and I'm glad I finally did it, it's a two part drawing(maybe more) where I focus on painting simple water textures, colours, fishes and some vegetation. I started with a simple sketch of the fishes and everything around it. I began to paint white colours for all the fishes before adding some orange in different areas, I also painted little shadows in some areas then added their eyes.

Painting the water was quite easy because I wasn't focused on too much details, my goal was to capture the whole scene in the easiest way possible. I painted some bubbles, colours and textures to the water. I painted the little flower by the side and added lots of leaves all around them.

For the pebbles beneath, I only painted just a few of them, one thing I love about using photoshop is the access to some image editing tools like the clone stamp tool. I used that tool with a simple soft brush, what it does is to basically clone objects from a certain areas to another with the help of a brush. I did this and spread the pebbles to other areas. Finally I painted scales and golden colours on the fish and added other tiny details.