Reproduction Salmon Build

For my Dad's 60th birthday my brother and I took him on a fishing trip to Alaska.  My Dad is an avid fisherman.  On this trip he caught the biggest fish of his life on the Kenai river.

To commemorate this trip I decided to make a fiberglass reproduction of the fish he caught so he could display it in his cabin.

All I had to go off of were some measurements and a couple of photos.  His salmon was 48" longs and 55lbs.  I did some searching online and I found a fiberglass reproduction blank that was the same size, and even cast from a fish caught in the same river.

Here's what the blank looked like primed with paint.  The form was from a male hook-nose king salmon and my dad's catch was female (bullet nose), so I had to shave down the nose and reform it and sand down the hump on the back to better match his fish:

The next step was to airbrush it lightly with darker values:

I then use some steel wool to  rub off the color and show off all the detail:

Now for some color, my dad's salmon was form the river and had brownish-green and pink coloring:

Adding some more detail. One of the key artistic techniques when creating a realistic fish reproduction is "scale tipping;" which is painting each scale tip with a highly reflective paint.  This is tedious and time consuming on a fish of this size but it makes a huge difference.

You can see the start of the scale tipping in the photo below:

After many hours, scale tipping is done! Notice the shiny scale pattern:

More painting smooths out the scale detail; fins are added, glass eye is added and tail is painted:

Final mount on the wall in my Dad's cabin, teeth were made with silicon caulking:

Here's my dad with the actual fish he caught on his 60th birthday.  It really was that big!