Here is a White perch fish decoy. Decoy is 9 in white cedar belly balanced good swimmer .Aluminum fins . Painted in acrylics I use both airbrush and paint brushes to finish my Fish decoys.  

MuskyMitch

It has about 8 oz lead in belly to swim balance the decoys the scales are done with my burning  pen I make custom scale tips out of Nickel cadmium wire .

MuskyMitch

Muskyslayer,

The scaling process takes me about 3 hours or so on a fish this size .I have different size scale tips I use to simulate the scales on fish. I once did a 27 inch brown trout wood carving for a client that took me over 2 weeks to scale since the scales were only about 1/32 in wide .I like the effect of carved or burned scales over  using Wedding veil netting and spraying them on however the veil method is effective on certain fish like trout and small bait fish.

I use a Paasche VL1 and a VN1 as well as a Millenium airbrushes for 25 years plus and am comfortable painting with it. I mix my own airbrush  paint .

MuskyMitch