fish fish and more fish

I broke out the ink set tonight and it wound up really liking it. To paint with this set you actually have to grind the ink yourself from an ink stick to produce the liquid.  It's actually quite fun and I had a picture of me grinding the ink but accidentally deleted the picture....Anyway the first lesson was to paint  a fish and below is what I produced.  It turns out using this ink is a lot harder to use than watercolor (although it seems they would be similar).  It's much harder to control the concentration of ink and water on the brush.  

This was my best fish (above) but I had to practice a lot of strokes with the ink before I got something I liked.  You can see my multiple attempts below:

I really liked doing the fish so much that I thought I'd try to paint a Koi fish which is also popular in Japanese art.  I first used the ink to make the body and I added color with my watercolors.  The ink actually dries sort of light so I went back over the ink just a little with black colored pencil.  I tried not to use the pencil too heavy though because I still wanted the "ink" effect.  

Isn't it cute!!