Trauth carves specks, reds, bass and more from tupelo gum
When Tim Trauth targets a trophy speck, he doesn’t use a rod and reel, live bait, plastic lures or treble hooks. He doesn’t care about mono, fluorocarbon or braided line — and he doesn’t even need a boat.
So how does the 52-year-old residential home designer in Belle Chasse consistently produce trophies of awesome trout and nice redfish, as well as a variety of other species?
He simply heads over to his garage in Marrero, grabs a block of tupelo gum wood and his power carving tools, and creates realistic wood sculptures that he also paints to closely resemble the real thing.
“I’ve been fooling with wood my whole life, and I played with wood carving a little over the years, but just really started doing it more seriously two years ago,” Trauth said. “I’ve been trying to be a woodworker all my life, but I’ve found over the last 40-something years that I can’t cut a straight line. It’s funny — I can’t make a piece of furniture or a cabinet.”
But he can definitely carve and paint a fish — his favorite subject.
“We pronounce my last name as ‘trout,’” he said. “So with that being said, it kind of makes me a fish person. I do like to fish. I don’t do ducks because everybody else does ducks.
“I’ve done some butterflies, a couple of flowers and a hummingbird, mostly for the women in my life who don’t want fish.”
His subjects are typically mounted on a driftwood base, and from start to finish, he said a 14-inch trout can take 30 hours to complete.
“I call them fish on sticks,” Trauth said. “I go to the Mississippi River and I pick up driftwood, then I carve the fish and put it on the driftwood with a basic wooden base, or just the driftwood base.”
The entirety of the carving — including background scenery like underwater grass or oyster shells — is carved from wood.
“I believe that a wood carving should be wood,” he said. “Some people, when they do background plants, use copper or thin metal.”
Mostly self-taught, Trauth learned a lot about carving from his dad, who’s been doing it for 40 years now.
“I started with a Dremel tool and went on from there. Then I bought a professional power carving tool, and with that I actually have the Dremel and power carver hooked up,” he said. “I have dozens of different shaped bits: ones for details, rough-cutting and sanding.
“I’m always experimenting with new tips to find out the best way to deal with the particular result I’m looking for. Without a lot of help from other people, there’s a lot of experimentation.”
Trauth has come up with a unique way of creating realistic-looking fish fins: he uses extremely thin pieces of plywood he gets from a hobby store, and adds them in after the body of the fish is carved.
“All the fins are added on,” he said. “I cut the fin out, cut the grooves in it and burn the little rays into it. Then I actually put it in hot water and I press it to give some curve to it.”
And as someone who does actually wet a line every so often in Lafitte, it’s not hard for him to catch fish to study and make his carvings more realistic.
“I’ve actually had a speckled trout in my freezer for a few months that I took out two or three different times to look at,” he said. “You put in the freezer, wash it to get some of the ice off, look at it a few minutes then stick it back in the freezer.
“For redfish, I actually had a redfish head in my freezer for a while. Everything else is just looking at pictures.”
Trauth has carved a variety of fish, from largemouth bass to Siamese fighting fish, angelfish, brook trout, tiger trout and more.
His home design business — Design Collaborative, LLC — gives him a unique edge in having access to computer programs that assist in laying out the images of the fish onto the wood.
“I’m able to draw on the computer because I do that all day,” he said. “I can take a picture of a fish and draw the outline over with the details and the fins and make myself a pattern.
“Then I print it out and put it on the wood, and cut it out from there.”
He’s only been carving seriously for two years, and feels like he’s made quite a bit of progress during that time — he even won first place for a speckled trout in the Louisiana Wildfowl Carvers and Collectors Guild last year, and also donated a carved trout for the West Bank’s CCA auction.
But he says mastering two unique talents — wood carving and painting — is something he still calls “a struggle.”
“I’ve always been like that — anything I’ve ever made, I’ve never been totally pleased with,” Trauth said. “I know where the mistakes are and I see the mistakes, but I’m also very aware of where I started from and where I am now. And it’s a huge difference.”
For now though, his pieces aren’t for sale to the public: He doesn’t have a large inventory of carvings or even a website to sell them on, and they’re extremely time consuming to complete, so coming up with a sales price would be difficult.
But most importantly, he gets very attached to his work.
“The biggest problem I have with this, even though I’m not totally pleased with every piece, is I’m actually greedy,” he said with a laugh. “Once I make it, I like it and I want to keep it.
“Especially the bass and the brook trout — there’s no way I’d ever sell those.”
