Drawing Flies 52 Boss. We like the old-school here at the DF52 project! A classic steelhead/salmon fly, done in a rather “improper” way (but then, my illustrations are frequently tortured into existence via whatever method I can get to work).

Tech info: 9″ x 12″ tracing paper. Mechanical pencil colored with watercolor pencil and watercolor crayon. Went in a direction I had not intended, and I just made the time cut-off (ran 29 minutes). I started the fly in way that I used to do a lot when I was younger: a pencil drawing on tracing paper. The idea is to use a hard mechanical pencil to carefully draw the outline of what you want, and then use a very soft pencil (even a charcoal) to coat the backside of the paper. That is then laid over the paper you intend to draw on “for real” and the tracing paper image is drawn over again with the mechanical pencil to make a transfer to the underlying sheet (with me so far?).

My intent was to transfer the image and then basically paint using the transfer as my guide. I never got that far. Once I had done the initial drawing (which took a few minutes extra because I wanted to get the hook and bead-chain really clean and bring a sense of flow to the hackle and tail), I realized that I actually had a solid beginning. So, I decided to go for it directly on the tracing paper. That’s when things went weird and right all at once.

The paper was so thin and so water-soluble that it wrinkled almost immediately. But it also wrinkled in this really predictable way (as I discovered). So, I scratched in the watercolor pencil, and then hit it with a wet detail brush. Instant color and instant wrinkles. I kept the magnitude of the wrinkles under control by pressing the paper hard a few times. As it dried, the newly textured paper gave me some ideas.

I grabbed my watercolor crayons, laid in some slabs of color over the wrinkles, and then dove into the white. I took care to get certain highlights laid down cleanly (hackle, eye and hook), but I went after the tail by loading the brush heavily and then allowing it to skip over the wrinkles in the paper. Made for a really cool effect with almost no work and very little time. I finished the fly with the blues. The lesson for this fourth fly: Go with the flow (and the wrinkles).

The real problem came with the scan. Getting a clean image from wrinkled, translucent tracing paper was not as simple as I’d hoped. The image shown here is reasonably close to the real deal, but I’m going to have to scan it again on my other scanner (with more advanced software) to get it right.

I should add that my color scheme is a bit “hot rod” for a reason. I like street rods and muscle cars, and anyone who knows much about that world knows the “Boss” name (maybe an FF&W reader or two even owns one…).

Available for purchase? No.

Jeff’s Boss is here! As I expected, Jeff makes the metal bits really pop with just a few well-placed brush strokes. I love that. Like his Mickey Finn, the fly is a classic dress, and it’s matched nicely by the real thing (conveniently attached to an even nicer steelhead)!