Laurena Schultz said the same thing to all the latecomers: "Come in. Grab a dead fish."

Ms. Schultz, the teen services librarian at the Mt. Lebanon Public Library, was leading a session of gyotaku, a Japanese method of printing using real fish, as part of the monthly teen activities series at the library last week.

In the process, artists paint on the dead fish, covering fins, scales and even eyes with pigment. They then drop paper, or in the case of the Mt. Lebanon class, a T-shirt, over the fish to pick up its imprint.

	Tony Tye, Post-Gazette Amber Nagy, 18, of Carnegie, shows off her fish print. Click photo for larger image.

"It's messy. It's a good thing to do outside," Ms. Schultz said, although the session was moved indoors to the meeting rooms because the 90-degree weather would have made the fish smell even worse.

Gyotaku -- the name means fish rubbing-- is an organic art that combines the accuracy of scientific illustration with the expressive composition of the Oriental arts. Like our individual fingerprints, each sea creature has its unique characteristics, which the gyotaku artist brings out. Ms. Schultz chose the art form, started in Japan in the 1800s, after learning about it through a Teen Summer Reading Club training workshop with District Services.

As she gave a primer, students walked over to a large blue container and selected a fish, then carefully dried it.

Ms. Schultz turned to participants seated at the table, which was lined with 16 Dixie cups of bright paint, and demonstrated how to set the fish on a piece of newspaper and splay its fins, using pins so that every surface could receive paint.

"Shake a few pins out [of the box] so I don't get fishy fingers in my pins," she advised.

The first six students through the door, some of whom work in the library stacking the shelves, said it was the first time they had tried the craft.

"It's not as old as some of the other Japanese art forms, such as bonsai or origami," Ms. Schultz told the group, which started as four but grew to more than 10 as parents of latecomers tried their hand at the imprinting.

"The first effort can still look pretty nice," she said. "You can [write] words coming out of the fish's mouth."

The kids took more than 20 minutes, in some cases, to carefully paint each fish, which Ms. Schultz bought at Wholey's or which her husband had caught in the Ohio River, for the occasion. One fish wore bright Pepto-Bismol pink and neon green. Others were more muted shades of black and red.

"If you go online, you can buy plastic fish, but that seemed to be cheating," Ms. Schultz said.

When the students were done, they carefully laid T-shirts on top of the fish and pushed the cotton knit into the crevices of the fish, capturing each bit of acrylic paint. When they pulled the shirts off, they had various imprints of the fish, some brightly colored, others soft and muted, depending on how much paint was on the fish.

"I love the smell of dead fish in the morning," said Amber Nagy, 18, of Carnegie, as she mocked Robert Duvall's famous line about napalm in "Apocalypse Now."

"I got a fish. It doesn't look too bad," she said as she pulled her T-shirt from her fish, painted orange and gold. But will she wear it?

"Probably around the house. I'm going on vacation. Maybe I'll wear it there," she mused after she painted "Red" on the back, her nickname.

A younger boy who came to the class later was somewhat disappointed that they weren't painting on live fish. As he described the fire-eating fish he was going to paint, others put three or more fish imprints onto their shirts, adding their nicknames or words.

Ms. Schultz was dismayed that her fish's eyeball became gelatinous and hard to paint.

"The eyeball's kinda gooey, huh?" she said.

Library Director Cynthia Richey poked her head into the room and was surprised by how good the imprints looked.

"Isn't that fancy? That is great!" she said.

Ms. Schultz led a similar painting class in the library for children from the Wesley Institute and last week's class was the second the library has done.

"It's one of those things you'll probably never do again, but, at least, you'll be able to say you did it," Ms. Schultz said.