Tropical Fish World

It seems like a year ago that we were enjoying our trip to Aruba, but it has only been a few weeks. 
 


Snorkeling became one of our favorite activities, having first discovered it on an island tour a few years ago.   Now whenever we go, we bring our own snorkeling things and delight in the underwater world of tropical fish.   This year we added another item, a disposable, waterproof camera.    The photos do not nearly capture the amazing color, but they certainly help recall some vivid memories of it, and serve as good reference material for painting it.  



Underwater World

The real trick would be to convey with a painting the other sensory elements of the encounter, such as:  the muffled sound of lapping waves above, a strange crackling noise (fish gills flapping?), or the feeling of the warm, tropical water and an occasionally bump or brush against of curious fish.

One of the funniest things to watch was my husband swimming ahead and watching a thousand fish trail behind him, they obviously were thinking he was the dominant, boss fish.   I also experienced being the big fish and if I swam a bit, then twirled around, there would be a thousand pairs of fish eyes and big fish lips facing me.  Wild!

I started this painting of the underwater world with a wildly colorful underpainting of cool yellows, greens and pinks.   Close range fish and coral seemed crystal clear in person.    They were actually magnified as evidenced by my erroneous perception of how close the bottom was when I tried to set my feet down.  As things were further away it got murky fast, and as it turns out, the camera had trouble focussing on anything too far away.  Stripes of wavelet fractured light crisscrossed everything under the water.   It too got dimmer in the distance.   These were the environment observations that I tried to include in the painting.

We had a plastic reference card that had pictures of various Aruba reef creatures and could match up what we saw which included all kinds of parrotfish, grouper and lots of yellowtail snapper.   I had some good pictures of the following fish which is why they made it into the painting.  The yellow fish with black stripes are called Sergeant Major.   The fish with a pinkish body and light periwinkle bluefins and tail was either a blue angelfish or a grey angelfish.  The large black fish with yellow dots and a greyish face is a French Angelfish.   Down in the crevices between the rocks and coral we spotted many Long-spined Sea Urchins, the black prickly-looking creature.

I loved painting this because of the variety of color and coral texture and am thinking I'll try another one soon while the learnings are fresh in my mind.