Painting the Elusive Brook Trout

By Steven Weinberg

How do you paint a trout? 

I start in the water, ideally in the stream behind my house n the Catskills and the small hotel my wife and I run, The Spruceton Inn. 

Walking through our meadow, I’ll sneak by guests reading in the hammocks, trying my best conceal my seven and half foot 3 weight rod behind my lanky frame. Next, I slip down the game trail in the brush that I share with the deer and beavers. Wet wading, I step in the water, feeling the early-season chill all the way up my legs. If I look upstream, I can see the sun poking through the forest canopy reflecting off the riffles, but my interest is drawn to the shaded bank. I’m off to stalk brook trout under the hemlocks.

On a March day like today, I think a lot about fishing. It seems to take all of spring (and a significant chunk of the summer in the Catskills) to get there. When those days finally arrive, my brain sort of empties. I mean, as I’m out fishing, I tell myself again and again to remember how perfect a day is when you’re catching so many fish it almost seems rude to count. All I want to do is fish. And then, eventually, paint.

The thing about hooking a brookie is that they are some of the most rational fish in the world. When a hook hits their mouth, they go ballistic. Who wouldn’t do the same? That makes it hard to get a really good look at them right away. The speed and ferocity of their movements tell an important story. If in all of that chaos I can glimpse a perfect rust-orange belly with, and just the right shade of Hooker’s green on the body and a dynamic constellation of red spots, I know it’s a fish I’ll really want to paint.

I let the fish calm down. I cradle it just barely out of the water and take a good long look, trying to commit as much to memory as possible. I usually snap a photo too. Then I gently unhook the fish and watch it zip away, always studying those zig zags. They show rocks I’d never think a fish would hide behind. Finally, after all this, it’s time to paint.

How do you paint a trout? Back in the studio I start with the face. 

In watercolors I’ll take a mixture of Antwerp blue and Hooker’s green, maybe mixing in a touch of cadmium red or alizarin crimson if it’s a darker colored brookie, and make a big wash of it on my palette. I load up my brush and bring it to my paper. Usually this is followed by a deep breath. 

The first touch makes or breaks the painting.

I bend my wrist in what must seem like an impossible manner so the tip of the brush can be pointing straight down while the tip of my elbow juts out like a chicken wing past the top of the paper. Then I do this sort of radial swoosh. If all goes well, in one single movement I’ve outlined the defining tip of the trout’s jawline followed by its whole top all the way to the tail.

I’ve had a pair of amazing painting teachers in my life. 

My first was in high school, Walt Bartman. He was a bit of a cowboy with paint and gave us thrillingly little direction while assigning the amount of work you’d expect in a university. While we painted, he’d play Joseph Campbell documentaries and throw out gems of knowledge. 

I remember one day we were painting his rooster named Kurt Schwitters. He gave us India ink and told us to paint the rooster as fast as we could. “It’s all about the silhouette!” he yelled. “Look at how Sargent, or Whistler, or any old master paints a figure. Nail the silhouette and it’s easy from there.”

I think about that a lot.

Painting a fish in watercolor has a sort of obvious harmony to it. Fish live in water … why not paint with it? Their skin absorbs light in a shimmering way, where pigment suspended in water seems best suited to capture it. The paint is alive while you paint. Until a previous wash dries, the next brushstroke can either ruin the painting or bring it to another level.

And that’s basically how I paint the body.

I take that initial wash of green and blue and steadily mix in more and more titanium white with my brush on my palette. I watch it turn lighter and lighter until it’s the color I want it to be. Then it’s time for another brushstroke that will make or break the painting.

I hold the brush now, like you would a pencil, and do a brushstroke across the middle of the fish making sure to catch the still-wet first stroke with the tip. That naturally allows a dark-to-light gradient bleed from top-to-bottom. If I do it right, my mind goes right back to the stream, feeling the light through the hemlocks when I was holding this fish. If I don’t, well … I probably start over.

My other amazing painting teacher was in college, Bevin Engman. She was not a cowboy. 

She followed the strict color theory of the Bauhaus School and her idol was a different Joseph, Josef Albers. We painted color wheels, collaged color squares, and talked and talked and talked about color.

It took me three semesters until I was allowed to paint anything besides a square. When that finished, desperate to paint anything tangible, I dove into portraiture. I remember how she would look at my portraits. To most people, the number one mark of a good portrait is the likeness. Not surprisingly, she didn’t really give a shit about that. She’d always want to know if the bottom lip really was reflecting that light. She’d want to know why I didn’t trust myself to mix the right color beforehand instead of blending them together (lazily) on the canvas. There was no end of questions. And they were always about color.

I think about that a lot.

Because I don’t want to give away all my secrets, I’m going to skip now all the way to the end. I’m not going to tell you how I paint the tail, how to get the yellow or orange of the belly just right, how to paint a pelvic fin in just one stroke, or where to place the eye and how to get that perfect highlight on it. 

That would be like both giving up my favorite fishing hole and fishing it for you. What’s the point in that?

So, let’s skip to my last step: dots. 

Trout have dots. Rainbows and cutthroats have a veritable cosmos of black/gray dots all over them. Browns generally have a bit fewer which are, like the name, brown, though sometimes a rusty red too. One general word of advice if you find yourself painting a fish’s dots: don’t paint them all. It looks a bit ridiculous and ends up crowding out every other detail. I leave that to the photographs.

Most brookies near me have two categories of dots. There’s a sea of yellow circles and ovals on the top of their body. These can be a screaming bright pure cadmium yellow, though more often they’re somewhere between that and a green. Like all trout dots, they help break up their silhouette from above, so they blend with the stream pebbles and such. You know, camouflage. That way the birds don’t see them. Or the anglers.

But then there are the red dots. My favorite! These usually appear as a jagged grouping across the middle of a brook trout’s body. As there’s nothing in the woods anything close to their screaming red, I can’t see how they improve the camouflage. If anything, they seem like a pure fashion statement. For mating maybe? At this point you can probably tell I’m no biologist.

Every brook trout seems to have its own unique pattern of red dots. I’ve seen a few with just one (very striking) and some with up to fifteen on a fish the size of my index finger. Often, but not always, they’re haloed with a mixture of a titanium white and Antwerp blue. That’s what I put down first anyways with a straight plop from the tip of the brush. From here it’s important to let the paint dry, which is hard. Because the next step is often my very last step in the painting. After, I either want to paint another fish or probably go fishing again.

First, I get anxious. In that way watercolor painting is pretty identical to fly fishing. There’s very little benefit to rushing things. If anything, one hurried snap of a wrist can ruin an hour’s work.

Next, when the whitish blue halo is dry, I rinse my watercolor brush of any residual water and paint. It’s a good time to really clean a brush and return it as close as possible to that state it was before I started painting. You know, like drying your fly. 

Then I usually squeeze out a fresh dab off cadmium red onto my palette, I put a tiny amount of water on my brush, and load it up with some of the fresh red. I want to make sure when I apply my brush to the painting, it will create one small red circle enveloped in one large light blue halo.

Like fishing, some days I’ll make a false cast first. I’ll do a practice touch of the red on some scrap paper. If it looks right, I take a deep breath.

I make the final red dot.

Then, I go fishing.

Again.

–Steven Weiberg‘s fish paintings have been featured in galleries, The Catskill Fly Fishing Museum, and on the cover of Thomas McGuane’s fly fishing classic, The Longest Silence. When he’s not stalking trout or painting them, he writes and illustrates kids’ books out of his home in the Catskills where he and his wife run the Spruceton Inn. More at stevenweinbergstudio.com and on Instagram @steven_draw