Bright Pondie. Halfway to carving all the fishes

  • The Bright Pondie, carved from basswood. Looks like I am carving all 10 of the fishes of the sea of thieves. (especially since I have already primed the Islehopper #6)

    A few observations about the pondie.
    -When you first catch a pondie it looks HUGE. it's so big that the tail isn't in the monitor frame. A trophy pondie is slightly bigger. What I have been doing to compare sizes of fish is looking at them in the frying pan as they cook. If you lay a pondie next to a splashtail, the splashtail is longer.

    • the only freshwater fish, they have an upturned mouth designed for feeding at the water surface.
      -The tail is similar to a nurse or lemon shark(useful for swiming long distances with minimal effort). Odd since the ponds are small

    • They are 1 of 2 fish that have scars ( the others are the battlegills) So something in the ponds is attacking the fish, since they really can't bite each other with the upturned mouths. There are no other fish in the ponds so the scars either from from pirates or something else ( crabs??)

    • Alot of the fish seem to be based on real-life fish. If I had to suggest the inspiration for this fish, I would pick the guppy, or maybe a close relative to the guppy, the mollie.

    At the end of the day, this was a lot of fun to carve, but the worst to paint. Yellow is a terrible color in acrylics because it does not cover anything underneath. I would equate it to using a highlighter. The marker lets you see exactly what is on the paper below the highlight. So there were a LOT of coats of paint. In the end, I went with lemon yellow with fluorescent yellow mixed in the paint.

    They need to come off the plant stand

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  • @liningthrower69 wow it looks amazing man good job.

  • Well done! These look great!

  • @liningthrower69

    Yarr she be a beauty!!!!!
    Nice

  • @LiningThrower69 Beautiful work!

  • Stunning

  • Thank you all for the kind words. This is what is on the table now.

  • could you do a shadow stormfish after the islehopper?

  • Fantastic work!

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