A.K. Best, a master illusionist of fly fishing who used bits of feathers, fur, hair and thread to create lifelike beetles, mayflies and other aquatic insects, tying them to hooks and enticing trout to the surface of streams and rivers for deceptively tempting meals, died on Aug. 20 in Boulder, Colo. He was 92.

The cause of his death, in a hospital, was an aortic aneurysm, his daughter Suzanne Morgan said.

Mr. Best was renowned for his mastery of the meticulous art of professional fly tying. He produced nearly weightless artificial lures that mimicked the midges, caddisflies and other bugs that fish eat; his specialty was dry flies, which float on the water’s surface.

Ed Engle, a fishing companion and a longtime outdoors columnist for The Boulder Daily Camera, wrote in 2010 that Mr. Best’s peerless designs fooled discerning trout palates “to a degree that verges on the miraculous.”

Mr. Best also wrote books and magazine articles, spoke at seminars and made instructional videos with the professorial tone of a pipe-smoking teacher, which he had been. (Pipe smoke helped keep the mosquitoes away while he fished.) Fly Fisherman magazine said, in a tribute after his death, that he “shaped the soul of modern fly fishing.”

For hours at a time, Mr. Best sat in his basement workshop in Boulder, using a vise, pliers, tweezers, a toothbrush, sprigs of feathers and other tools of the trade. He made the wings and tails of insect replicas by hand, for personal use and at a commercial pace of roughly 40 lures an hour and 36,000 a year for companies like Orvis, Umpqua Feather Merchants and Urban Angler. He was said to have attached a shoulder rest to his phone so he could keep tying while taking a call.