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Gone Fishin’ #2

I spent a fair slab of this weekend working on building a larger trout - to paraphrase and distort the old saying: “If you can build a better trout, the world will beat a path to your door”. 

Having finally settled on the correct method (see previous post), it was time to get cracking by firstly drawing the template onto the betting tickets.  That done I then decided to draw the minimalist trout features onto the tickets, rather than cutting out the pieces and drawing onto the cut pieces.  As I don’t want the trout features to be overly dominant and take away from the betting ticket itself, the drawing is confined to trout markings, fin and tail, and gill features.  This set of pictures demonstrates the actual drawing process, and the finished product prior to cutting.  The plastic implement in the first photo is a godsend when it comes to the later assembly, especially for gluing in tight places and holding down tabs of paper prior to the glue setting.

Once the drawing was completed, I sprayed it with fixative just to ensure that smudging was minimised.  Then it was time to get out the industrial strength craft knife and start cutting out the individual pieces.  I worked on doing one piece at time, what with drawing, then waiting for fixative to dry, followed by cutting, then gluing and in turn waiting for the glue to dry....sort of lent itself to semi-finish one piece and then crank up the production line on the next piece.  It takes about 25 to 40 minutes per piece, subject to the complexity of each piece.  So when a couple of pieces were completed and the glue had semi-cured it was time assemble piece-by-piece as they came off the production line.  Everytime I’ve made these I’ve started with the tail, seems more logical than starting with the head?

After a couple of pieces had been assembled and the glue had cured, I then painted them with gel medium for additional strength and texture (love the clamminess that the gel medium provides).  In between waiting for pieces to dry etc, it also provided a chance to have a break and punt on a couple of races (3 bets for 2 winners including one winner at 20-1 - oh fish give me more luck, please!).  It is really from this point that the complexity of assemblage, gluing and folding becomes more intricate, thank god for that plastic blade thing.  At times it’s a really tight fit to get pieces to fit smoothly together, sometimes a bit of force is required to shoehorn them into place....but care is required because if too much force is used one can crush the trout’s body.  The head is by far the trickiest, quite a few cuts and folds to work through, but once that has been sorted you end up with a final product that looks like this:

I’m happy with the way this has turned out.  The size of the fish works, the drawing elements don’t overpower the surface of the paper, and the gel medium gives a great texture.  Now only a few more to build, but that’ll have to wait as I’ve run out of betting tickets and I’ll get a new supply during the week.  Once enough trout have been created it’ll be time to build a paper stream for these trophy trout to reside in.  The paper stream will be a real challenge, will really need to put the thinking cap on......at least I have until May to get it sorted.