Painting Fish and Water

I like watching fish and the challenge of trying to draw them through moving water. The ripples distort both the image and colour, allowing a view down to the bottom one minute and reflecting the sky or overhanging vegetation the next. This scene was sketched in pencil late one summer evening beside the Skirfare in Littondale. The river bed a bright orange colour, distorted by the ripples reflecting the pale cobalt of the sky, with the three Brown Trout rising lazily to take the hatching flies. The watercolour was painted later and exhibited at a Yorkshire Artists Exhibition in the Crescent Art Gallery, Scarborough.