Heres some advice for anyone who has breeding aspirations after seeing this thread. When selecting your breeders go with a male with larger pearls. Larger pearls = more area of the body is pearled and will increase your odds of having heavily pearled fry. Pearl inheritance is crazy when it comes to tex hybrids, you can get half scale, carpintis style (I call them popcorn shaped, but if you don't understand that you are welcome to stand in the corner and go duh dur while drooling on yourself), double pearled, net pearl, etc. If a texas hybrid is barely pearled it's no good lol. If using a parrot female get ahold of the nicest and reddest you can find. Make sure the face doesn't have weird angles and dips because that will pass down to fry in various ways. Go kkp all the way.
Selecting grow outs from your first generation is the easiest thing. Focus only on the fish that have good pearl coverage. Then from your nicely pearled fry you will hope to have a female fader to move onto the next step... I have tried a few f1 males and it's always the same heartbreak of infertility. I have seen a thread on here where the breeder said he wasn't worried about pearls he was more concerned with color in that generation and that idea is just another set back. Ultimately you are trying to get every generation to have both heavy pearl and fading genetics so early on you don't want to sacrifice one for the other, you have accomplished nothing. The color of the faders is largely unpredictable anyways. You can use the reddest kkp there is and you will still get fade shades from pale yellow to deep red and everything in between. You still want to use the reddest fish just to ensure that color is present genetically but I would take a heavily pearled yellow "rt" over a pearl less red "rt" any day. I have also found that the earlier the fade the lighter the tone will be.
I don't understand the hostile response to my first reply. I even ended my first post with the encouraging remark of "neat fish but you can do better". Why the negative response to some first hand experience? You titled your thread "red texas project" so I assumed guiding advice would be appreciated. If you had titled your thread "random ugly long faced barely pearled pale fader project" I wouldn't have said anything but that's not what you titled the thread. I'm wondering how much you paid Butthurt for the pair? You both seem pretty defensive about them. Maybe he pumped you full of bs when he sold them, I wouldn't have used either fish in a "red texas" project.
Carry on