× Expand Kandis Elliot draws life-size fish in their bright, breeding colors.

Artists find their muses in different places. For example, Kandis Elliot recently finished rendering every single kind of fish in Wisconsin.

“After the first 90 I was ready to hang myself,” she says. “But I kept going at it.”

It took two years.

Hers is art on a mission: educational outreach on behalf of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Zoological Museum. Elliot’s life-sized piscatory portraits range from the one-inch darter to the 6-foot lake sturgeon. In all, 183 species are portrayed in Elliot’s masterwork, now a 13-foot by 44-inch poster.

There are nine other posters in the museum series, portraying families of fish, such as sunfish, perch, pike, catfish, gar and minnows. They’re available for purchase by schools, museums, sports bars — anyone who wants one.

“I was always one of these kids who could draw,” says Elliot, a witty and frank-speaking science illustrator with degrees in biology and zoology who retired from the university in 2011. She recalls societal attitudes toward pursuing art when she was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s. “If you’re a smart kid and can draw, they tell you to go into science. Of course if you’re a girl, they tell you to get married. But the point was to go to college and get an education because art is for the ‘dumb kids.’”

She proved them all wrong, following both art and science. She still enjoys pencils, but her patience runs out before paints can dry. These days her palette is pixels. Despite the rich, iridescent colors and vivid, lifelike imagery, Elliot calls her work illustration, rather than art.

She spent 20 years as an illustrator for the botany department, including creating posters for schools. “I thought, let’s do a kind of gee-whiz poster, lots of color, lots of pictures, to get into middle schools, high schools, that sort of thing,” she recalls.

After so many years of working with plants, Elliot returned to her zoological roots: “The botanists call it going over to the dark side.”

There have been other posters of Wisconsin fish, but none have been all-inclusive, nor have they been drawn to life-size scale. Elliot depicts the fish in the brighter colors they take on for breeding. In addition to using photos for reference, Elliot relied on specimens provided by John Lyons, a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources fisheries research scientist.

The large poster is printed on canvas and the smaller posters on archival quality paper. They’re priced at a little more than the museum’s cost, and serve as a minor fundraiser. Prices range from $25 to $150. One of the first customers was Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium.

Elliot’s next challenge? “We’re doing bats of Wisconsin,” she says. “There’s only nine of them.”

For more information, visit the website of the UW-Madison Zoological Museum, zoology.wisc.edu/uwzm.