Fish Outline Drawings: 20 Bass, Trout, Betta and Saltwater Species with Silhouettes

Seventeen real fish make up most of this set, drawn close to life in fine black ink: overlapping scales, fin rays, gill covers and the whiskers on a catfish and a koi. The last three designs are for anglers. All 20 come twice, once as detailed line art and once as a solid black silhouette, and there’s no color anywhere in the collection.

Lake fish, tank fish and ocean fish

Every fish faces left, and all but the flounder are drawn side-on.

• Lakes and rivers: a largemouth bass with its wide mouth and spiny dorsal fin, a rainbow trout speckled with small spots, a sockeye salmon in breeding shape with a humped back and hooked lower jaw, a channel catfish trailing long barbels, and a northern pike with a flat duckbill snout and its dorsal fin set far back.
• Tanks and ponds: a fantail goldfish, a halfmoon betta whose tail opens into a half circle, a tall freshwater angelfish with long threads hanging below, and a koi with long, flowing fins.
• Saltwater: a porcupine puffer blown up round and bristling with spines, a great white shark, a sailfish with its long bill and raised sail, a flounder seen from above as a flat oval with a fringe of fin around the edge, a slim sardine, a blotchy grouper, an Atlantic bluefin tuna with a row of small finlets ahead of its crescent tail, and a deep-bodied tropical fish banded like a clownfish.

The three fishing designs

Design 18 is a fishbone with the head and tail still on and the ribs curving up from the spine. It’s a decorative motif, not an accurate skeleton. Design 19 is a largemouth bass with a hook in its mouth and the line curling up and away. Design 20 is a frame: a rod runs along the top with the reel at the right, the line drops and twists down both sides, and a bass lies along the bottom. The middle is left empty, with no words in it.

What the silhouettes keep

Each silhouette is a single filled black shape with no inner lines. Only two designs have a second piece: the hook and line in 19 sit apart from the fish, and the frame in 20 is a ring around its open center.

Fish with a strong edge stay easy to name in solid black. The sailfish keeps its bill and sail, the catfish keeps its barbels as thin strands, the puffer’s spines ring its body, and the fishbone keeps open gaps between its ribs. Other fish lean on details that disappear. The clownfish-type fish loses its bands, and the trout, sardine and salmon end up as similar torpedo shapes that differ mainly in their fins and jaws.

Pages, artboards and cutting

Both PDFs follow the same order: silhouettes on pages 1 to 29, line art on pages 30 to 58. Each style gets 20 single-design pages, five pages with four fish and four pages with six, the last of which holds two. Every fish is labeled with its number and name. On US Letter, the single-page bass prints about 6.5 inches long, while the four- and six-to-a-page sheets shrink the longest fish to about 3.2 inches.

The SVG and DXF files share a 10 x 6.5 inch artboard, and the PNGs match it at 3000 x 1950 pixels. The bass fills about 8.8 inches of that width. The line art isn’t one connected piece: the eye, scales, gill lines and fin rays are each their own small shape, which comes to 744 separate outlines in the bass DXF alone. For machine-cut paper shapes, the START-HERE notes suggest starting with the silhouettes. Nobody has run these files through a physical cutting test, so try your size and material on a scrap first.

Questions

Do any of the designs come in color?

No. Every file is black artwork only. The PNGs have a transparent background, and each SVG uses a single black fill, so you can change the color in your own vector software.

Why does the betta look like a round blob in the solid version?

Its halfmoon tail and fins spread into nearly a full circle, and the silhouette fills all of it in, so only the small head sticks out of a dark disc. The line art version shows every fin ray, so use that one when you want the betta to read clearly.