Prep Work

It's funny... when I was a kid, all I ever wanted to do was catch and draw fish... especially trout! I even did a few trout paintings way back then and sold every one of them without much effort. And honestly, they weren't very good. Hmmmm...

A renewed interest in fly fishing and all that goes with it has started the wheels turning and I'm considering a series of trout/fly fishing paintings over the next couple of years. There is a fair amount of good fishing art out there, but not a lot. One of my goals with this endeavor is to create a very genuine window into the fish's world... often attempted, but rarely with much success (including past efforts by yours truly). One of the most challenging aspects to this type of painting is realistic and lifelike fins. The fish's fins are propulsion and stabilizing devices, so they are constantly moving. They have a fluid and transparent look not easy to convey with pencil or paint. Many times fish paintings seem to have a flat lifeless look and I think most of that is due to poorly painted fins (and using taxidermy specimens as reference material). Several dozen "fin drawings" are likely in my immediate future. So the prep work begins. I've been very fortunate to have a close friend with a very nice underwater camera she takes scuba diving. After borrowing the camera and shooting a few hundred images, my view of how things actually look in the water has been fine tuned a bit. A lot of drawing will be a priority before any actual paintings begin to take shape. Sketch books will be bursting at the bindings with trout drawings as the composition process gets underway. I also need to shoot a few hundred more images to better understand the "aquatic" look I have in mind for these works. And that means I'm going to have to spend more time fly fishing. Well shoot!☺