With the booth set up on Thursday afternoon, Tim Johnson put together a desk and assembled his microscope with lighting and a screen for onlookers to see what he was seeing through the ocular lens.  Of course there was a hiccup with figuring out the correct cord to make the display screen work but this was solved the next morning when the show began.

The dial that Tim would be working on through the weekend will end up in an Olmsted field watch for a customer who asked that a notable brown trout that he caught be painted on it.  For this commission piece, Tim began with an outline sketch on his iPad which was followed by moving a photograph of the actual trout to the screen as reference.  This would guide his painting through the weekend and give onlookers a good idea what he was seeing and how that would translate through his artwork.   

With this initial work done, it was time to put a light sketch outline on the dial and begin painting.  

The remaining photos in this post are occasional snapshots over the next three days as I tried to capture every layer that Tim put down.  It's amazing that so much work was completed, as Tim was set up in the outer corner of the booth area and connected with so many show attendees who wanted to ask him about his artwork and what he was doing.  Understandably, there was a lot of interest as it isn't often that you come to a fly fishing show and there is a guy eyes deep into a microscope.