At about the same time I had been hunting down frames for various art prints and original paintings I had accumulated. Every few weeks I'd be back in discord yelling about frames to anyone who would listen. I especially was looking for frames for the trio of celestial Elk64 prints I had gotten from the Kickstarter in 2023. But I had maybe 12 pieces I was looking for frames for occasionally

I spent a LOT of time looking for frames from Michael's to Amazon, to local thrift stores. I'll document those in another post. These two are from Michael and poorly made. The left one is plastic and already peeling the right is a wood colored sticker on plywood. I used 4 sheets of mesh origami paper I had lying around for the lynx backed by some silvery blue card-stock.

But I kept second guessing myself since the lynx was part of a set with a bull I eventually used the frame for another print. I just tested a lot of things like I realized that the gold foil on the eagle-peacock-unicorn set was the same color as the gold foil I had and was considering how to incorporate that (nothing happened). Nothing was glued so I can use the origami paper in another project. I dug out some scrap blue fabric and used it with the fox painting. The fox print was from society6 I think, their stuff is low quality don't get it if not on sale. The gold looked horrible as a print so I got some gold paint and painted over it, I also added some paint strokes to the tail. I just tried out a lot of frames and papers, I wanted something navy and gold as a diy mat but not so busy as to distract from the painting.

I found this frame and realized it was a good size for the lynx-bull duo. I also had a rabbit bookmark I thought would display well. And tried a lot of arrangements This one I might go back to since there's no glue it has a tendency to shift around.

I then got a set of 3 square frames off of Amazon for my set. In the end I was unable to find a navy mat I was happy with, so I made my own with the precut mats and the last of the washi tape. That's why only the peacock has a double layer of washi tape, I ran out! One of them (eagle I think) is actually pieced together with scrap washi tape from the other two.

Maybe 3 months back I got the bright idea to display these sets of Elk64 prints with my Yuumei fish since they're all white, navy, and gold. Side note there are sooo many shades of gold I gave up matching them so there's like 5 different golds here. Balancing all the frame shapes and colors was pretty hard since 3 of the frames are the same shape it's easy to throw off the visual balance. The odd peacock frame actually helped with visual balance here instead of having 3 identical frames I only had to deal with 2.

I originally tried to hang them with adhesive hangers so I'd be able to change positions but the adhesive nail-less hanger took a chunk out of my wall so nails it was. I did try to use minimal nails so there's only 5 nails, the rest of the fish and stars are suspended by a net of clear jewelry thread. This was a real pain to put up since I didn't use glue or tape either, everything stays in place with friction. The thread is looped around the 5 nails in various ways to wrap around the fish fins to angle them properly. I dropped the fish several times during this so now the fins are all bent I had to climb on furniture to get this done (this is near the ceiling) and I'm not doing that again so even if I'm not 100% satisfied it's good enough.

In like nov 2023 when Yuumei had a sale on her koi fish lantern kits. I'd been eyeing them for years but hadn't bought any because they're expensive and I'm poor. Anyways after much internal debate I got 3 fish in pearl gold, navy, and white. The fish come as sheets of metallic solid color cardstock. I then spent the next several weeks planning what designs I wanted. I didn't want to go out and buy a bunch of stuff (probably would have turned out better but this result is acceptable). And what I had on hand was starry celestial washi tape from Elk64's NEBULA : Bestiae ex stellis artbook, and and some old silver and white markers (more on this later). And after drawing a few lines on scrap paper I had a general idea of using the washi tape on the white fish, silver marker on the blue, and white marker on the gold fish. But was yearning to add some gold to the white fish. it took me a while to decide on gold foil vs gold leaf and I eventually decided on foil mostly because it was cheaper in case I messed up (I didn't know what I was doing). I decided on a celestial theme fairly early on inspired by Yuumei's celestial koi. Pretty early on I decided on white being sun (what's a sun but a nearby star), gold being moon, and navy being star.

For the gold fish the concept was the round golden autumn moon so I just outlined the round edge of each scale so that the metallic gold of the paper would be showcased. Along the fins I drew rounded shapes and lobes. The gold foil was added later to tie it visually to the white fish.

From the start I wanted gold and blue on this fish to tie all the fish together as a set. The washi tape is patterned and the goil foil adds a lot of texture so I didn't draw on the while koi at all since I wanted a more elegant design that wasn't too busy. I didn't actually intend for the gold foil to be textured, I just sucked at using white glue so much that's how it turned out but I like the result and this one seems most popular with other people. The washi tape was also a mess because it wasn't sticky enough and kept peeling off until I glued it down. All the glue means it doesn't really function in it's intended purpose as a lampshade but that's fine I never intended these to be lights. I also I had to cut and assemble each scale since the scales are larger than the width of the washi tape and this was my first fish so I wasn't sure how much of each scale was visible. This was the first fish I assembled and because I didn't follow the instructions and build starting from the head towards the tail I was then unable to join the two halves of the fish and then had to disassemble half of it so a fair bit of the paper is bent or torn which I stabilized with more glue, so this is the least structurally sound of the fish, it does not pose properly. This fish was inspired by the sun so I wanted it to be the most boldly patterned with the streaks of gold inspired by solar flares, blinding white against a starry sky.

So it turned out the silver marker I had wasn't silver, it was blue (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!). The cap color lied and the writing was is Japanese so I didn't realized until after I had drawn several rows of scales and at that point it was too late. The thing is that it's blue ink with silver shimmer so on my blue test paper the blue ink bled through leaving only the silver visible and I didn't do enough test scales on the navy paper to notice how blue it was. A lot of paints and markers have a colored solvent media that evaporates leaving behind metallic pigment so I thought the blue would go away once the marker dried. The blue did not go away. So I doubled down on the marker and did the rest of the fish. If it had been silver like I intended this fish would have fit in better with the metallic white of the other fish. I did try a couple organic solvents to try and get the blue to dissolve out and it kind of worked but I also smeared the silver pigment everywhere so this fish is a bit of a mess with silvery blotches. But the end result is acceptable and the white fish is also kind of textured so it doesn't look out of place. this fish was inspired by shooting stars so I used a lot of dotted lines. This concept is my favorite. This was the most intricate/ornate fish and I might have overdone it. The dorsal fins were assembled out of order to give a more ragged appearance like the tail of a comet. The tail was also attached upside down to make the 3 fish more diverse when displayed as a set.