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.