Help Achieving A Transparent Look To Fins

Hope everyone is having a good week,

I am getting ready to try and paint a reproduction lionfish and while thinking of a gameplan to tackle the color scheme I have run into a problem.The caudal, soft dorsal, anal fin, pelvic fins, and parts of the pectoral fins are all transparent. The membrane area between the lips when his mouth is open is also fairly transparent as you can see in the picture. The blank is fiberglass and I will definetly need to primer these fins so I was trying how to figure out how to get that look. I searched the archives and also rewatched some Rick Krane material. I also looked at other lionfish reproductions that have been painted and in general it seems most people just white the fins out rather than try and get a transparent look. I will do that if i must but I would like to try and get it as lifelike as possible. I had considered priming the fins white and then seeing if i can pull something off with candy paynes gray to give an illusion but I don't think that will give me the realism I am after. I also contemplated maybe taking some fin magic and possibly mixing a drop of candy paynes gray in it and seeing what kind of result that would give. The fin magic gives that nice transparent look but I have heard it will yellow over time. I was wondering if anyone might share a procedure they have used in the past to get that transparent illusion.

Thanks for your time and have a good one
Chris

 

I was able to find kinda the look I am after. The person who painted it is/was an artist at Marine Creations. I am hoping they may be a member here and can answer but if not I will drop them an email if they are still in operation. Would anyone have any suggestions on the color combination he used in order to achieve that transparent look to the pectoral fins, caudal fin, etc? Any help would be appreciated.
Have a good one,
Chris

 

Hope everyones fall is going well and I appreciate all the advice. This lionfish project is a personal project that has seemed to stretch on forever working on it a little here and there. I am not good on colors and color theory but am getting some decent results on achieving the look of the lionfish in the picture attached. I have him mostly figured out aside from the transparent fins.

I have tried most things i can think of to try and get a good look. I tried starting with a white primer base and then going along the inner webs with candy paynes gray. This gave me a decent look, and i think i can get by with it on the caudal, dorsal fins, and anal fin, along with some pastel work and pastels. But the pectoral fins and pelvic fins still trouble me. In particular the transparent portion of the pectoral fins.

To try and get that look i attempted to mimic the look of the lionfish replica i posted above done by marine creations. To my inexperienced eye it looked like a base of something like buckskin over the white primer. Then a light misting of white over the top as you approach the transparent section of the fin, getting heavier towards the center of the transparent section of the fin, and then fading back out as you approach the fin base. When i did this though, i did not get a great result. Their is just something missing. It seems like in the example from marine creations like their is a turquoise of some nature misted that helps add to the illusion. I just cant figure this part out.

I have attempted some other techniques to try and achieve this with mild success. I have tried various applications of fin magic, both tinted and untinted with pigments to try and achieve a similar effect but that didn't really give me what i was after. At one point I thought about potentially cutting the fin in half vertically, hollowing out the section that would appear transparent, inserting a xerox stiff plastic material and then bonding the 2 halves back together. The problem with that is that i don't have the equipment to really pull that off cutting such a small fin vertically.

If anyone might have some other tips on what I am doing wrong I would greatly appreciate the input. Here is the fish I am attempting to paint. If i can just get that transparent section right on his pectoral fins i think it will turn out pretty good overall. I really appreciate the above tips and thanks for your time.

Chris.

 

Here again are the 2 examples from Marine Creations that pull off that illusion of transparency.