Drawing Fish & Flies 52 rainbow trout & Royal Wulff. It’s late…more later. For now, think tattoos and corroded plaster. Hardly the stuff of trout streams, but this is DF& 52 and anything goes! Well, now it’s early, but I’m up, so I might as well flesh this out.

The ‘bow and RW combo is a classic one in fishing (at least to me), and the first truly big ‘bow that I caught on a Royal Wulff I caught in New Zealand when I was 13. It was cool to be able to catch a fish of four pounds on a pattern, that until that time, had only caught smaller, small-stream trout for me. The fish above is a remembrance of that first RW-caught ‘bow. I don’t have a photo of that fish, but I do have a visual sense of it still in my head (especially the interesting jaw shape).

Notes: I had this idea rattling around in my head all week, but wasn’t 100-percent sure how I would execute it. When I sat down to paint, I went fast, probably faster than I should have. I was concerned about time, and ended up being through the image waaay early. I wasn’t satisfied with what I had (again, too fast), so I washed the image, wiped it and then instantly saw what I was going to do.

I dropped some thinned-out hues here and there, tossed the soaking wet thing onto my scanner, and got it into Photoshop before it had time to dry more than a few seconds. The wetness of the paper and the saturated colors were easy to enhance with a few adjustments, and I suddenly had what I really liked. The end result felt like a cross between a tattoo (thinking New Zealand Maori tattoos) and a corroded plaster wall (I just like that feel, it has nothing specific to do with trout fishing, other than perhaps reflecting the look of certain buildings in some places that I have been over the years).

Process: Pencil and watercolor on 140lb Canson stock. Washed and wiped, then re-painted and scanned into Photoshop. Image levels and saturation adjusted in Photoshop.

Available? No, this is an analog/digital hybrid, thus no true “original” exists. Kelley (my wife), however, loves this piece, and told me I should do several trout this way and offer the images as greeting cards. Something very different than the usual angling fare. I may consider that, especially if anyone else agrees….

JK’s Image: Jeff’s R&RW image can be found here. Really nice start, Jeff, and I see that the original is spoken for already!