Bret, my tai chi and sword painting buddy, is one of those few! Today Bret and I did fish painting after watching some instructional videos on qigong by Master Li and on Chinese painting by Henry Li http://youtu.be/vR05SDhiHjo
We followed Henry Li's technique pretty closely even thought it's a very loose and adaptable technique.
Here are 7 fish.
This painting is on 15 x 33 inch sumi rice paper with sumi ink and a Chinese watercolor set from Hobby Lobby. There are 7 goldfish because Colleen is having a feast of 7 fishes on Christmas Eve and I'm going to give her this painting.
Then I showed Bret some zen circles and I added the fish.
In the painting number 3 there is one zen circle and 2 fish to make the number 3 or you could think that the third fish is in the mirror universe implied by the emptiness of the circle and/or the numbers 3 facing each other. There are 3 fish even though you can only see two.
The painting number 9 has one zen circle, one free form fish, some rubber stamped shapes and a free from Chinese branch. The number 9 stamped in bright orange/vermilion multiplies the fish by 9 to get the 9 goldfish for good luck.
These 2 paintings are on light brown hand made Indian pastel paper. The paintings are 9"x12" is 200 gsm earth tone paper with 4 deckle edges.
Then Bret got tired and the cat sat on him.