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Finished Product
Randy LaPrairie |
Once you get him all filled then you sew him completely up, and then you take
him and you turn him over cause at that time, when you turn him over the
face of him will be flat. Then you take your hands, because the paper
mache is still soft, and you form the fish back into the shape so you
are actually forming it yourself. You are not working from a mold and
you are putting it back like you know he was. Then, from there, I'll have
him on a board with hardware cloth on it. I'll take styrofoam and prop
him up and pin him up like he needs to be. So when he dries he'll dry
in the same position you left him and not in a different position. Then
I'll put him in a drying box, which is like a closet with a heater in
it and I put the heater on for a day. After that day the skin has hardened
up enough to where you come back in the back and you can cut the opening
in the back and you empty 60% of the saw dust out and you'll still have
some in that is wet and you turn the fish over and leave the fish in the
drying box like that. That enables the humidity inside the fish to come
out of the fish. Once it comes all out of the fish, probably by about
the third day, he's pretty much dry. This fish still has sawdust that
I never got out. You get in there with a knife, a butter knife or something
like that, and you pull that sawdust completely out of it. Then you just
dump the sawdust back in the container that you took it out of and reuse
it. That way you are never at a loss for sawdust.
Once I get to that point
then I was taught that okay we've cut some small boards, you put one on
the inside and one on the outside, you put a screw through both of them
and it pulls up against there. Well when you do that the only way you
can mount the fish is flat up against the board. So now I've taken a way
that I use, and it's one of the reasons why I use this hollow body method
is I'll take the insulating foam that you put in the cracks of doors to
keep the wind out. I'll fill him full of that.
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From Mr. LaPrairie's Art Gallery...
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I'll take a piece of heavy
gauge wire and I'll bend a loop on the end and stick down in there and
when the foam foams up it comes out that hole and it foams up around that
wire and once it hardens I cut the excess foam off and set aside.
Then the fish is ready to be painted, well actually I'll take a piece
of acetate and glue to the back of the fins with contact cement. It makes
fins flexible where they won't break. You do that and then you seal him
with a sealer and once you seal him with a sealer you are ready for paint
him. You put the eyes in and paint eyes (glass eyes). Once you put the
glass eyes in it's ready to go. Then I'll go back and I'll paint my white
on the belly, my yellow on the bottom of the belly and then the green and the
black. Ill come back with the red for the gills and I'll use some gold
on my scales, to highlight the scales, and I have some green that I also
highlight the scales with. It's pretty much finished after that. A lot
of people don't like fish because they don't know how to paint them.
They can mount them but they don't know how to paint them. So they shy
away from fish and you'll see a lot of people that mount ducks, they mount deer heads,
they mount everything else, but they still shy away from fish.
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