Shells

I've done a whole series of watercolour/pen/ink pictures using this shell shape and will post the others in coming days. It's an interesting motif.

Get your skates on

'Ello John - Got a new motor?

This representation of a fish like a John Dory was done with the old transparent watercolour inks. I wet the watercolour paper in the shape of the fish and then dropped carmine ink onto the wet area, followed by cadmium yellow. The ink stays within the boundaries of the wet area and the colours are mixed by tilting the paper in different directions to get the ink to merge. Then I put some rubber masking fluid around the perimeter of the fish and did the same procedure of mixing the colours on the paper for the background.

Seahorse

More Fishy Improvisations

These are all done with ink, brush, pen, gouache and acrylic paint on watercolour paper. The idea is to be as free as possible at first, letting the ink do want it wants, with a bit of help from the wetted paper. Then one can build up the shapes and forms using brush in the eastern Zen style: quickly, spontaneously, freely - hoping something good will happen. The drawings are finished off with gouache and maybe some acrylic paint. The ancient inks I've been using are actually called transparent watercolors, made by an American company that probably no longer exists. I went to my local art shop to see if there was an equivalent product but no luck. I'll try the Windsor and Newton inks soon but I'm not sure whether they'll be as wonderfully transparent as these old ones.

More dabbles -- just done

Dabbling in the dark

I've finally emerged, with the aid of crutches, from my bed of convalescence and managed to muck around with pen, inks, watercolour and brush for an hour or so. It was good fun and I'll continue to explore the possibilities. The idea is to be as spontaneous as possible, in the tradition of Japanese and Chinese ink and brush: load the brush with black ink and let the line lead you; then I added colour with an ancient set of watercolours I found in the garage and some equally ancient watercolour inks with beautiful luminosity, finished off with Rapidograph.

Pelagics

Large schools of Pelagic fish (defined in Wikipedia as fish that "live in the water column of coastal, ocean and lake waters, but not on the bottom of the sea or the lake (and) contrasted with demersal fish, which do live on or near the bottom, and reef fish which are associated with coral reefs") are one of the great sights of scuba diving, especially when a large school is made up of large fish. My first sighting was the previously-mentioned barracuda battery in Thailand while I was still learning to dive. I saw even more barra batteries in the Similans, that fantastic dive location in the Andaman Sea off Thailand.
Funnily enough, one of the greatest pelagic displays I've ever seen was at Harbord in Sydney on my 114th dive. By sheer luck for our small Dive 2000 group a big school of yellowtail kingfish, each fish averaging about a metre in length, suddenly arrived and started terrorising a school of yellowtail scad. It was an amazing thing to see and we were right in the middle of this hunting frenzy. My inveterate buddy, Liz, managed to get the event on video (see D2K website).
Another great site for pelagics is Lady Elliott Island, where schools of giant trevally cruise around and there is a resident group of manta rays. I've seen schools of large kingfish and mulloway at Julian Rocks and Fish Rock but I'm yet to see a pelagic shark, unless Port Jackson sharks are counted as such. They spend most of their time in very deep water but we see them in winter when they come to the reefs around Sydney to breed. Another shark I've regularly seen in Sydney, specifically at Fairy Bower, are the juvenile dusky whalers, who hang around the seagrass beds in summer but eventually grow up and become pelagics in the open ocean. Most of the grey nurse sharks I've seen have been at Fish Rock (a place where you're guaranteed a GNS sighting) but, even though these babies are big, they're not pelagic like great whites and other dangerous sharks.
The Yongala wreck in northern Queensland is another pelagic wonderland. The wreck is effectively an isolated reef in the middle of a 'sandy desert', so pelagics regularly come in and pick off hapless members of the resident fish that have established a home on the remains of the steamer that sank in a cyclone almost a 100 years ago.

Tribute to Achoerodus viridis

What's not to love about Achoerodus viridis? They're cuddly, friendly, inquisitive, smart and good-looking. We divers always call them blue gropers even though they're a type of wrasse from the family Labridae (sounds like labrador, which is appropriate).
Virtually every dive on the east coast of NSW will include a sighting of an eastern blue groper. They live as far north as Hervey Bay in Queensland and as far south as Wilson's Promontory in Victoria. I've yet to see a western blue groper (Achoerodus gouldii) which ranges from WA to Melbourne. Interestingly, the western variety can grow a fair bit bigger than the eastern: 1.6 m and 40 kg compared to 1.2 metres and 22 kg.
One diver buddy of mine has become wary of bluies after one apparently acted in an aggressive manner towards her on a dive. They can be a bit pushy sometimes, especially if you unsheathe your knife and they get overly excited at the notion that you might be about to prise an urchin off a rock to feed them, a practice frowned on by a lot of divers these days. It makes sense that if the gropers get used to being fed, they'll take it for granted and even get aggressive; I've seen similar behaviour with kangaroos (but not underwater, though I was once chased by a demented kangaroo into the sea; while I cowered in the water he stood at the water's edge and bellowed at me, looking very smug and alpha). I've heard that if gropers are fed too much by divers there may end up being more than one blue male in a small area, which can lead to all sorts of political turmoil and factionalism. A fascinating and frankly quite weird fact about these fish is that all gropers start out as female and the dominant one in an area turns male and blue. I'm not sure whether there are constant power struggles and battles going on as a new green upstart decides the time is right to turn blue and male and knock out the existing dominant male. Probably not a lot is known about the intricacies of blue groper behaviour (there's still a heck of a lot we don't know about fish behaviour overall) -- maybe I should undertake a study, with a hefty government grant!

Barracuda

I learned to dive in Thailand in 2002 while staying at a place called Naithon, on the west coast of Phuket. My friend, Paul Lambert, persuaded me to sign up, along with him, for a diving course with Aqua Divers, a school run by Rainer Gottwald, a Slovenian-German, and Jens Hofacker, also German. The only non-German-speaking staff member, besides the Thai divemasters and boat boys, was Denis, a Francophone from Switzerland. It was handy that Denis didn't speak German because then the other guys had to speak English to communicate with him, as none of them spoke French. Of course, Paul and I, like most Aussies, are monolingual.
We ended up doing both the PADI and CMAS courses: the former at Aquadivers Naiyang, north of where we were staying and the site of Phuket's airport, and the latter at the Naithon branch. The Naiyang branch was destroyed in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.
Just off the coast in this area there is a little island with a coral reef that provides some great dives. It was whilst diving there in April 2004 with DM Boris (another Frenchman, from Grenoble) that I had the marvelous experience of being followed by a school of barracuda.
I hadn't taken up underwater photography at that stage so I painted a barracuda instead.

Aquatic Adventures in Abeyance

It's an unusually cold Spring day in Penrith as I sit and contemplate our small backyard: my contemplative view for a week already and for another few weeks to come, as I recover from having an arthritic hip replaced with a titanium version.
How much longer until I can get back underwater? This depends on my recovery, of course. The physiotherapist mentioned six months, which is longer than I'd hoped. My last dive was in late August and a six-month recuperation means I won't be sucking air from a reg until March 2010! I think six months could be the maximum but I'm definitely not going to push it and jeopardise my full recovery; besides, a dislocation at 30 metres underwater wouldn't be pleasant!
I'll try to maintain the blog, illustrated with aquatically-themed drawings and paintings, once I can sit comfortably in my little studio. A previously-painted fish adorns this post.