Wow, I’m greatly honored by all of your kind words! That was a “fun” fish to do. Rick, I must be getting old (LOL!), because it took me a few minutes to remember when I sent those pictures to you.
Frank – LOL! It will be a bummer to miss the fishing trip, but being able to hear about it in person from you guys will be the next best thing.
Mshipman, nice soft colors on the LM Bass. Doug, that Alligator Gar is frickin’ sweet – I’ll bet that was a tough one to do!
Well, in case anyone is interested, I’ll bore you with some details about the Sturgeon. As you can see, I molded the head and fins and did a pedestal skin mount with the seam on the belly, and this has been the first and only Sturgeon I have done. I would tackle a smaller or larger one the same way in the future, though. To help with easily blending the transition from the head to the body, I chose the best place to separate them, which in my opinion was just behind the bony collar areas, which ended up also including the very first dorsal bony plate with the head cast. The fish was just short of 60” (we can only keep them out here from 42” to 60”). My client wanted not only an S-curve, but he wanted the tail to be rolled/swept off the centerline so that it was very visible when looking directly at the back of the fish. That proved to be somewhat difficult because I had to roll the centerline beginning near the middle of the fish through the tail, and always had to keep in mind while working on the body that the axis of the centerline was changing at an increasing rate as it approached the tail. To do that I had to use a much larger block of foam than what would typically be required, and when blocking out the body to get the top and side profile, I had to include extra wide margins in the rear half to compensate for the centerline being angled. Carving the body in regards to the cross section of the body was somewhat helped by the body having sort of a pentagon shape with the lines of bony plates forming the points of the pentagon. Mounting of the skin on the body was not atypical of any other fish, but fleshing the skin did require quite a bit of work because not only did the skin need fleshed, but the inside of each of the bony plates or scales within the main five rows had to be cleaned individually.
I probably would have painted the fish a little lighter in my mind’s eye, but luckily my client gave me CD of Sturgeon pictures of fish they had caught over the years with emphasis on the fish examples with the color that he liked so that I could get it the way he wanted. Painting was done with airbrushing and hand painting, and much of it was done with the use of washes and drybrushing. A wash is basically a very thinned concentration of paint that is flowed into the low areas of detail or texture, and in the case of this fish it was a darker paint than the color of the surrounding area. Drybrushing is lightly dragging a brush (that has had MOST of the color that is being applied wiped off) over the high areas of detail or texture to highlight the raised areas, and is usually done with a color lighter than the surrounding tones.
The client was eventually going to be making his own habitat and putting the entire thing inside of a case, but for the meantime he wanted it with a removable hanger on the belly so that he could hang it as if it was swimming along the wall (with the belly against the wall) and then later bolt it to his habitat. A T-nut placed in a block inside the body was utilized so that these varieties of attachments could be easily accomplished.
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