I was hoping this appointment would be the last bit of shading before we started more outlines.  Shading scales is tedious and time consuming though, so Horizakura wasn’t able to finish the koi’s head in our usual two hours.  He said next time we will finish the koi and start the outlines!  Which is both exciting and terrifying because if my memory serves me correctly, outlining is absolutely no fun at all.  See photos below (how ’bout that tan line!), I believe I will update again in about 2 weeks!

I am very excited to write that the black work is nearly complete.  If I had to guess, we have one more appointment to finish the partial black shading on the koi.  After that, we are back in outline world.  Not sure how that will pan out, but I imagine it will start from my shoulders and extend from there to my arms (as opposed to starting with the arms and connecting it all later).  I have opted to go this route instead of doing color on the back piece because the color will be fairly quick, so I would like to be able to do all the new color around the same time.  I hope this is coherent. I just wrapped an 18 hour show day… I’m a little shot.