FRENCHTOWN -- She's nine feet tall and, by all indications, landing a lunker.

He stands nearby in saggy-baggy teenager pants, his skeleton cap of steel turned sideways.

Her hair is made of zero rebar. Most everything else is No. 3, the kind of rebar that reinforces concrete.

The boy points to the girl in awe -- or is it envy?

"He's wondering why she caught a fish and he didn't," conjectured Brian Schmid, creator of the pair.

They are fishing kids everywhere, but right now they're in Schmid's backyard.

Come spring, the rebar sculptures will be in Missoula, anchored to boulders in Silver's Lagoon, the reincarnation of the children's fishing pond at McCormick Park.

"It sort of identifies the goals of the pond," said Donna Gaukler, director of Missoula Parks and Recreation. "It's about kids and for kids and enjoying the natural environment in a very safe setting -- you know, the kind of excitement and serenity that happens all at once during fishing."

Schmid taught art at Sentinel and Big Sky high schools for more than 25 years before retiring in June of 2005. All that time, and even before, Schmid specialized in large portrait paintings.

Eight of them hang in Missoula International Airport, honoring members of the Museum of Mountain Flying's Hall of Fame. For years, Schmid's provided art for friend and former Missoula coach Lanny Bryant to use on the cover of his nationally distributed magazine "Wrestling USA."

Schmid has painted trains and boats and motorcycles and even a series called "Reflections," which explores such things as the juxtaposition of windshields and rearview mirrors.

Satisfying, even intoxicating stuff.

But since his retirement in 2005, Schmid has found a brand new bag. His rebar sculptures have started popping up - a fly fisherman at Ibey's Nursery, a cowboy and a golfer at Caras Nursery, a German shepherd at his brother's home in Billings.

"This is lots of fun," Schmid said last week, as he turned a blow torch on the fishing boy's pointing finger. "From doing portraits for 30 years, it's tons less pressure."

Schmid said his wife Linda dubbed it "environmentally friendly art."

The three-dimensional see-through sculptures, though larger than life, don't smack a person in the face.

"The idea is that they become part of the environment instead of separated from it," he said.

Schmid estimated he makes from 200 to 300 welds per sculpture. He pointed to a small collection of short, shorter and very short pieces of rebar on his workbench.

"I've done seven of these and that's all that's the waste," he said. "I can find uses for almost every piece."

His bar-bender, band saw and welding torch are "absolutely the backbones" of the process, Schmid said. The raw material is plentiful and not all that expensive.

Rebar is a common construction material. You can get it "by the gobs" if you need it, said Schmid.

It's easy to work with, hard to damage -- and light. Schmid had no problem picking up his rebar boy, whose fishing pole towers 12 feet in the air, and moving him up a slope to his workshop to perform metal finger surgery.

A pair of seemingly unrelated happenstances in the spring of 2004 got him into rebar art.

His only child, Jessica, was a junior and three-sport athlete at Frenchtown High School. She already had plans to attend college in Minnesota the following year.

Brian Schmid was taking an advanced education class in welding, after completing beginning and intermediate courses a decade earlier.

His instructor asked him what he planned to do.

"Well, weld," Schmid said.

"No, you're not going to weld," the teacher said. "You already know how to weld. You've got to find something to do."

Thus, his first larger-than-life rebar art. It is a basketball-playing Jessica, poised for a layup on the Schmids' front lawn.

"I thought if Jess is going to be a thousand miles away, maybe we can have her home every day," he said. "That's what started it."

Schmid was anxious about his daughter's response when she first saw the sculpture. But Jessica not only knew that it was her, but recognized where she had shot that layup -- at a 3-on-3 tournament in Polson.

"She was thrilled," dad said, gratefully.

He loved the fact that -- much as his paintings were of clearly identifiable people, many of them Olympic heroes -- so too could the sculptures be.

"We've had people come up for dinner or whatever, and they'd get out of the car and they'd get this look on their faces, like somebody was watching them," Schmid said. "They'd look around and say, 'Oh, there's Jess.' They knew right away it was her. So that was pretty cool.

"To anybody else that goes by, it's just rebar that looks like a basketball player. But not to us. So the sculptures kind of take some of that emotional element that in some cases the paintings have."

Schmid said the potentials for rebar art are limitless. A friend tends to drive down a street or highway and note the "perfect place" to position the cowboy, the golfer, the fly fisherman.

He brainstorms projects with another friend involved in the redevelopment of downtown Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

"We were talking about doing a paddle wheel, a one-third or quarter-sized paddle wheel" to put in Lake Coeur d'Alene, he said.

Rebar sculpture is at its best, Schmid believes, when it rusts deeply enough that the welds blend into the rust. It can be accented with sheet steel, or powder-coated or painted. He's excited to explore the uses of fiber optic filament, so perhaps he can add a luminescent fishing line.

Gaukler and Schmid share visions of art in the parks and trails of Missoula.

"One of the goals of the master parks plan is to include and incorporate, either through direct installation or through integration, more art throughout the parks and trail system. I guess we're kind of doing that in bits and pieces," Gaukler said.

State law dictates that1 percent of the funding for a civic project go to the arts. That helps with city park projects, Gaukler said, adding that "more sponsorships will help out too."

Schmid has been "wonderful to work with," she said. "He's a great artist, and he's actually been very helpful in making that happen. I can't say with any certainty what this one particular project will lead to. But I'm very hopeful this isn't a one-time thing, that this is the start of something really significant."

Meanwhile, the yet-to-be named fisherkids rust into fine art in the hills above Frenchtown. She keeps playing her fish. He keeps pointing.

They'll fit well near the entrance of McCormick Park, Gaukler said, though you'll probably miss them your first time past.

When you do notice, she said, "it's sort of like a discovery, which is fun because that's what being a kid is all about -- a whole system of discoveries. We'd like the park to be like that."

"The idea is that they become part of the environment instead of separated from it," says Schmid, who calls the work "environmentally friendly."

Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com. Photographer Kurt Wilson can be reached at 523-5270 or at kwilson@missoulian.com.