You can live anywhere on the planet and do this style of art. He's gorgeous. Yep. Yeah. Put him
down. My name is Lisa Herman. I'm a marine artist here in the Upper Keys and I'm the owner and
operator of Gallery of the Arts. The Keys is definitely an influence on my art hands down.
I mean you can't ask for a better color palette than what we have here. I really like where the
horizon line I'm just in love with it. I mean you get to see it so often here
and when you look at the horizon on the ocean it never looks the same. There's something simple
and you know, primitive about it. It's cool and I think that's what brought me into the gyotaku
process. It's very straightforward. It's very clean. Gyotaku is very interesting. Originally
it started back in the 1800s in Japan and it was a way fishermen could record their catches
basically before cameras existed. And because of this interesting layout and how they recorded it
it started to turn into its own form of art. This is neat. He's cute. Each fish has their own little
characteristics and personalities. We're like this guy's little character. He's missing a little part
here and a little part there. So each time I do it I get a little bit more familiar with the fish and
I make sure I pull up all those little different dorsal fins in there to make
sure their tails like, as fanned out as it can. I try to capture the fish like as lit up and excited
as it is in the wild. This one's perfect sized. I like to get a picture of the exact
fish that I've printed so when I come back to the gallery I can make sure all of its little spots
all of its eyes are exactly the way this one looked. Some of the mutton snappers have
really really cool teal like blue around their eyes. And I always wanna make sure
I wanna get it just right. It's like their little signature. Each fish that I do gyotaku prints of,
100% will be something that the everybody can share and eat. I'm not ever going to take a fish
that has just the purpose for printing. It has to be utilized beyond that. So when I am doing that,
I'm thinking about you know, this fish we're going to eat it afterwards so I only use very non-toxic
water-based acrylic paints. I do it traditionally where I use a very very black acrylic paint and I
always do the fish in black and when I pull it off after that, I do the embellishments.
Some clients want just the eye embellished. Some clients want the whole fish embellished
in color. Some want it just black and white as is so there's a lot of different stages and ways you
can and you can do this fish. Every time you pull that paper off it's like a big surprise.
Yup. Perfect. As I was exploring doing the gyotaku on fish, I thought you know, it'd be
really cool to do it on other nature. One of my friends has a big, beautiful butterfly garden so
I asked her if she ever finds any of the butterflies that passed on, didn't make it
let me you know see if I can somehow make them live on forever and got my hands on a
couple butterflies and they turned out magnificent. I do use different inks
instead of the paint. The paint was a little bit thick on the butterfly so I use inks
and now it's, I mean, I've tried dragonflies, bumblebees, different leaves, different seashells.
I'm always experimenting with different style canvases like I love my stretched white canvas
but there's something exciting and challenging about painting on oyster shells. I've painted
on sand dollars, the swordfish and now doing the gyotaku is very very
interesting where it's not your basic plan you know how to go about it.
Some different shells, some different bills, they kind of tell you what they want and they,
you kind of explore what that shape is and what that can house for that specific piece of nature.