This design has been adapted from an original silk painting created by my sister.  She is an amazing artist and we hope to transform more of her work into embroidered designs so look out for many future designs featuring her work.
I have used Batik fabric for the examples shown above.  The instructions have a variety of colours for the fins, but these can be changed to suit your own preferences and fabric choices.   It is a large design and requires a hoop with a minimum size of 300mm.
I split the applique of the fish into 4 sections as I wanted to position different coloured parts of the same Batik fabric on the fish for extra detail.  Feel free to just attach the applique down as one section if you prefer.  To do this just float the fabric on the hoop for step 2 and secure it to the background fabric while steps 2 to 10 are stitched out and leave the trimming of the fabric until step 10, then continue with the rest of the design as detailed below.