About the Art: Cast About

Update 2017/05/21: Changed post title from “New Art: Cast About” to “About the Art: Cast About”

It shouldn’t be any surprise by now that I love water and things that live in or near the water. And in that same vein, if I’m sketching one night and coming up with new designs, it would make sense for me to design a fish, as I did for Cast About.

This isn’t a typical Soulprint in that it isn’t comprised of a lot of swirls and circles, and it doesn’t contain hidden messages or symbols. It does however have a movement to it, which my typical Soulprints often do as well. Cast About isn’t pretentious or try to be something more. It just simply is what it is, and that’s what I like about it. (:

The fish isn’t a specific, real-life type of fish. It’s loosely based on koi, goldfish, and betta fish. Once I had honed the design, I drew the fish. Early on I decided I wanted to include a water flower of some kind, so I drew something based on water lilies and lotuses. I felt it needed color, so I brought out my markers. I wanted the fish to be the focus, so I didn’t color them.

I tend to not do fully representative work. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be abstract art! Just about everything in this piece is loosely based on something. Except of course for the small round green bits which represent exactly what they are: duckweed.

Ahh, duckweed. How I love you.

At my childhood home, my mom installed a fish pond. We had some fish for a while, but we also had crafty cats who seemed to get into the fish no matter what we did to prevent it. So after a while, it became a frog pond. Frogs would come up from the swampy stream behind our house to hang around little pond. We had dragonfly nymphs and water bugs, and I think we even had a couple backswimmers at one point, which might explain why the frogs didn’t stick around (backswimmers eat tadpoles). But one mainstay was the duckweed.

Duckweed.

It looks so zen.

Little floating green bits of awesome.

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PS: I’m joining an art blog hop!