Drawing Flies 52 False Albacore (“Albie”). Wanted to stay with the East Coast fishing this week, and keep it in the salt, too. The colors and marking on Albies are well-suited to an artistic palette, in this case the digital CMYK palette in Adobe Illustrator. Update: I had pretty much this image in my head when [...]

I know that some FF&W readers have seen this fish before (a few of you of in the last week). This is a big rainbow (right around five pounds) that Kel caught a couple of summers back. It came from a small lake in central Oregon, and it has ended up in nearly every e-slide [...]

DF52 Bluefish. Done raw, fast, and uncertain in form—sorta like the real thing in a blitz. I’m too worn down right now to worry about anatomical perfection, so I went for roughness of shape and boldness of color. Hope you like it (I actually do). Jeff’s cool blue is here.

I was gone most of last week, putting some dusty mileage on Oregon’s passes and backroads. One place I ended up was the Yamsi Ranch in southern Oregon. Some of my time was devoted to a fly-casting clinic, but the rest of my hours were spent exploring the section of the Williamson River that runs [...]

I’m on the road, I’m in a hotel, and I’m fried. This week’s DF52 bluefish is going to be delayed here at FF&W. In the meantime, go have a look at Jeff’s really nice blue here. I’ll get my drawing up as soon as I can….

No fish in today’s photo, just water (but I guarantee that there are fish in the photo, just not showing themselves above the water). This was taken on one of America’s crown-jewel rivers, the North Umpqua. If you’ve never been to or fished the North Umpqua, you need to do so at some point in [...]

I remember the first steelhead that I ever hooked. It was a Great Lakes fish, and it had taken a big, black stonefly nymph with a deep, leaden heaviness. I pulled back—several times—thinking that I had a branch or perhaps the bottom. The big trout popped out of the water in a purely vertical fashion, [...]

Another quick pic to provide a little fish eye-candy here at FF&W. This is a shot I took many years ago, when film was what you put into cameras instead of SD cards. This brown was caught on Bartlett Lake on the Vermejo Ranch property. The combination of the overhead sky and the low angle [...]

No actual fish in this one. I just like this as a candid “my girl and me” shot (thanks, Flynn). Kel’s working a drop-off (just to the left, off-camera) somewhere on some water someplace in western Montana. A few hours after this shot was taken, Kel made one of the most dead-on perfect Puddle Casts [...]

DF52 Spotted Gar. I like gar. Cool lookin’ and they bite big, flossy streamers pretty nicely, too (if they are in the mood). The gar was Jeff’s idea this week, and we’ve both veered away from the mainline lately. Liking some of this “alternate species” stuff, but I get to choose next week, so perhaps [...]

DF52 Pacific lamprey. Perhaps not exactly what you expected? Think “koi” for now, and I’ll fill in the details (and why this image is so rough) later… Update: Okay, I’m back with some more info. I had a piece going last night, got 20+ minutes in and decided I really didn’t like it all—so much [...]

  Drawing Fish 52 Atlantic salmon. I love Atlantics. Perhaps my favorite cold-water gamefish in terms of the “game” aspect. When they are hot, right out of the ocean, they fight precisely like what they are: ocean fish in a river. Love that. If you go to a place where are still a lot of them [...]

  Drawing Fish 52 tigerfish. Been a bizarre week for me, so yeah, this is a Friday DF52 fish fry. Went back to a digital flag/poster for this one. Tigerfish remind me of a striped bass circa, say, 60 million years B.C. They are not pretty, noble, or jewel-like, they don’t rise gently to mayflies or [...]

Drawing Fish 52 brown trout. I have long been a bit smitten with brown trout. The first truly large trout that I ever caught was a brown (from Wyoming’s Green River). Outside of Alaska, perhaps the largest trout that I have ever lost was also a brown (from a surprisingly small spring creek in New Zealand). And the largest [...]