I recently bought a former-library copy of another book in the Reader’s Digest Nature Lovers Field Guide series, this time about the water life of Great Britain. I’ve always been rather fascinated by freshwater fish, even though the extent of my interactions are cloudy childhood memories of netting minnows in the streams around where we lived. More recently, I found a beautiful set of plates in my favourite Royal Worcester china (which I daren’t use as I’m clumsy) although there are a few more for me to collect. Here’s the perch:
This transfer is quite similar to the look of the illustrations, so I decided to have a go at recreating them in my sketchbook. I started with some graphite drawings as that was all I had available at the time, and then had a go with some gouache.
I enjoyed the lettering almost as much as the drawing!
Sidenote: I always thought fish was the only plural of fish but apparently you use fishes when talking about a group of fish involving more than one species. So you have a fish, a shoal of fish (one species) or a shoal of fishes (more than one species). I don’t think it’s the same for sheep and deer, though I might adopt it and see if I get challenged!
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