Question About Painting First Redear? (PICS)

One thing I would highly recommend, is to take pictures of fish shortly after they are caught. I may be wrong, but it appears the pics of the fish lying there are of one that is dead/has been frozen. If not, it is a pretty bland fish. I can't say that I have ever chased them here in KS, so I don't have any live pics to go off of. If you are wanting to reproduce the colors you see in the pics, they don't appear to be that difficult.
To lighten up the fish, there are many ways. You can pencil him, or even LIGHTLY mist him with a white. Be careful here. If you were feeling even more daring, you could white him out entirely and start with a white background (not my personal favorite, I prefer seeing the markings through my paint job).
Along the top down to the lateral line try a hint of a yellow (your choice), but be careful, as yellow is a strong color. Then shading over the top of that some blue (your choice). Go easy, and work the colors slowly toward your target coloration. Then I personally would tint and shade using different dark grays and browns to get the effect you see in the picture. Other than that, there isn't much color in your pics for the fish. Once again, not being very familiar with the fish, there should be scale tipping and other enhancements you could do to liven up the mount.

Good luck. Painting is the most fun thing to do once the mount is ready.

 

Greetings slabbandit. One of my manuals (Tom Sexton - Fish) suggests water & bleach and brush on. I don't have access to the manual at the moment but I believe it's a 50/50 mix.

 

I have lightened dark fish with bleach and would do that first. If not light enough for ya then mist white to lighten but stop short of covering markings.

 

I've never tried bleach. What I do with something like this is lighten it via misting some silver pearl belly/up. You might have to use some thinned white first. And then maybe some soft gold pearl on the top. This will still allow some of the markings to show through, lighten it and give you a metallic base (which I see in the live fish pics). Many ways to do it. Some will white it out and/or use a transparent white to lighten but (again) still allow some of the markings to show through to enhance.

Be glad this one has some markings. One I'm working on has no distinct markings at all. Pretty much a metallic base with greens over it and a red tick on it's ear. Very boring. Easy to paint, but it's going to be tough to make it look interesting...

 

Bleach is not much of a "trick" and white paint works much better ( or silvery or whatever.)

If you want the goods on doing a nice shell cracker, talk with Capt. Bryan.