Woke up this morning, had them Koi fish blues....

So remember I said that ideas come to me when I'm half asleep? This morning, as I lay there not really wanting to get out of my cozy bed and get going, I started thinking, for whatever reason, about two of the pieces of furniture in the basement that I bought a couple of years ago and stripped but that's as far as I got. One is a small bureau, for which I still don't have a plan, and the other is a maple table which I intended to stain and then paint a design on. The only thing I had definitely planned was a vine going up one leg and onto the top extending into...what? That's as far as the mental picture would go, and I was never really able to clarify what I wanted on the top. This morning, though, visions of lily pads and koi fish swam into my brain. I love goldfish, in all their gaudy beauty. This design (not the one in the pic, I have something slightly different in mind) appeals to me because you would be looking DOWN on the leaves and the fish, like you would see them if you were looking into a pond. How cool would THAT be?

I am not an artist. Things like perspective and proportion do not come naturally to my brain, so I will have to find some pictures and finagle them into something I can paint. Toward that end, I googled images of koi fish and was a little disappointed to find that 99% of the pics were of tattoos. While they were truly spectacular, they did not help me. So I'll have to do some more research, in the meantime I have some staining to do.