| With Sanke, what i think is most difficult to find is a balanced pattern. There is always the personal taste involved with some leaning toward big heavy patches of sumi and some who prefer a more refined look with smaller sumi and less of them.
With sanke sumi, there is some kinds that appear as speckled and then come together to make a solid patch and some that start as a small dot and continue to expand.
I don't believe there is a correlation that when a beni looks good and then the sumi starts to appear that it causes anything to happen with the beni. I would say there was a problem with the beni to start with and at the time the sumi developed ( second or third year) the beni fell apart. Things like saw tooth beni, uneven strength/density thru out the beni could signal a demise but if you didn't know what to look for it may have seemed that when the black appeared the red fell apart.
With matsunosuke based sanke, I have seem sumi come up and go down over several years.
These types of koi with this sumi seem to develop into something special quality wise, but I have also seen perfect shoulder sumi come and go and really frustrate the owner when they realize it's not coming back. I bought a tosai once that took first in a prestigeous japanese show who's should sumi went down as nisei but never came back up again the following year.
From a breeders perspective breeding sanke is very difficult. |