Smallmouth work in progress

Here is the start of a smallmouth that will have an underwater scene probably with it eating a clouser or one of Walker's flies which I can't say the name here. Not because it is some secret, but because it's not the type of language you use on a blog. Anyway, this piece is a white clayboard that I inked the fish onto and then began the scratching. I will more than likely add color to this board, but will have to wait and see. I would rather leave my boards without color, but the mood might strike. It won't be long before I'll have the boat out on the river throwing flies at these jokers. By the way this is the piece that I was going to update more frequently so you can see how these are created and the time it takes to accomplish one. What you see here took about 5 hours.

Here it is with about 2 hours of laying out the scales. The bad part here is that I'll have to go back over each one to get the tones right. I'll usually go back over it several times before it looks right.

Here's what I've got so far. I've run into some problems with the background, but I think its fixable. Just going to take more time. So far I have about 18 hours in it total. I 've got to fix the background, add a clouser, and then some more vegetation. Plus, I need to get all the values right. Lets hope all goes well because the fish itself started out really well.

This one is pretty much done now. I'm going to do a few little things to it, but you would probably not even notice. Now all I have to do is come up with a title.