Largemouth Bass

[taxidermist]

Not a big fish but still nice. I have included some closeup pcs of the detail work.

Thanks for looking.

John

[taxidermist]

30 inch rainbow caught by 10 year old boy.

[FRENZEL]

Thats a good looking Largemouth. What brand paint do you use? Hydromist? Lifetone

[tippett7]

Looks great. How long did it take you to complete that?

[ozark trout fisher]

Looks great. How long did it take you to complete that?

That's nice work. I don't know much about taxidermy, but it looks like the real thing.

[taxidermist]

Thanks, it took about 12 hours. most of it painting by hand.

I use mostly Polytranspar lacquer then some acyrilics and then some powders. The powders are applied soemtimes three times with three different colors to get the tone right.

I do lots of different things with the paints, making many of then semi transparent for layering the paint.

[FRENZEL]

I have played around some with replicas and I really like that look you accomplished with the bass. Seems to me that the airbrush for the bulk layers and then a lot of hand painting is the way to go. I am really more of a wildlife art hobbiest and just like the 3 dimensional canvas of a fish. But I definitely love that look.

[taxidermist]

[Al Agnew]

Taxi, as a fish artist I always look very critically at the paint jobs on taxidermy work, and have done four of my own fish, so take this for what it's worth...those fish are certainly a cut above the average paint job! The average taxidermist relies way too much on the airbrush. To do a largemouth right, you have to hand paint practically each scale. When I did mine (two smallmouth, a largemouth, and a walleye), I probably used 3 or 4 colors on each scale. I didn't even own an airbrush back then, and wouldn't have used it if I had.

Fish are tricky to paint, both three dimensionally or two dimensionally. Not only is there a lot of different colors on a fish, but each scale on a largemouth for instance has at least two "tones". On the upper sides, the inside portion of the visible scale is darker grayish green and not iridescent, while the outer section can be silvery, or almost gold, or bronze, or a lighter greenish, but IS iridescent and changes color with the angle of light hitting it. Not only that, but the live fish can change color, go darker or lighter, extremely quickly. I appreciated the close-ups because they show that you knew and duplicated that.

[taxidermist]

Thanks Al, I even try it with trout. Sometimes I have way more time in a fish than I should have, I use a comibination of pearls, shimmers, metallic powders ad irredescent oils Shiva sticks.

Fish are hard to photograph, both mounted and live. the colors just dont show everything.

Here is an old mount by someone else, I refinished it this week.

I try but like most artist I am always looking to improve my work. I use a very fine spotter brush, finger paints, waxes, and airbrush not a cheap one either $400.00 Iwata. I do use a cheap airbrush for broad lacquer washes. I even use some acrylic water based for color washes. Then when I think I am finally done I use a two part semi-urethane top coat with UVA/UVB filters to keep the colors from fading. On trout I custom mold all the head and on larger fish mold the fins and reproduce them in acrylic or fiberglass, on Bass and walleye I use a putty epoxy rebulding the areas that shrink. All bodies are hand carved for that individual fish.

JOhn