Now this was fun to paint and everything actually went pretty well. I’m starting to make friends with gouache and enjoying recollecting and putting to use some old watercolor skills.
I left off his fishing pole and some other fishing tools because I wanted to focus on the fish. I LOVED painting this fish and I’m thinking about buying some fish to paint. I’ve painted fish before, but only when standing at the fish counter at the local Ranch Market 99 and sketching these.
For Tuesday night sketchcrawl we met at Ranch 99 Market inside the Pacific East Mall, an Asian shopping center. I spent most of my sketching time in the fish department, where shoppers can poke and prod a huge variety of whole fish, select the ones they want and hand them to the fish mongers to scale, wash, and carve them into steaks or deep fry them whole in their gigantic deep fat fryer.
I didn’t want to get in the way of shoppers (or have my fishy model sold before I could sketch it) so I moved down to the bins of fish heads to sketch. But even in the low rent department my models were being picked over and sold.
The catfish (below) had long whiskers that reminded me of Salvador Dali.
We also sat on benches inside the mall and sketched diners at some of the restaurants. That made me hungry and it was getting late so I ordered takeout from Great Szechuan and we called it a night and went home. The dish wasn’t great, made worse by being slopped into in a styrofoam clamshell container instead of a traditional Chinese takeout carton and I didn’t even get a fortune cookie!
Jana Bouc, Artist 