Bring it on 2014!

Cheers to a hugely successful 2013!

It's been just over one year since the launch of this blog, and I'm pleased to say that, not only have I been updating regularly (OK so the updates dried up after October... I also work full time!!), but I managed to keep both of the New Year's resolutions I'd declared for my artistic ambitions many months ago. Besides meeting my stated goals of improving my crafting & taxidermy skills and displaying my creations at a local art show,  I've also put together a Facebook page as well as an Etsy shop.  Things are going quite well, and with 5 Etsy sales and 10 admirers in about a month, I am confident that the ChupacabraCrafts Empire will continue to grow ;)

Proof that not all of my friends are dead animals

This past summer I joined a group of local artists, tattooists, photographers, and skateboarders for a huge warehouse party aka Free Art Show.  For the first time my paintings, prints, jewelry, gift boxes, (in hind sight I brought WAY too much shit) and earliest taxidermy pieces were on display for the public eye.

Self-promotion can be a challenging skill to learn.  For introverts like myself, it can be down right terrifying. On top of that, not everyone you meet actually likes taxidermy. On more than one occasion I've been insulted, called "creepy" to my face... and so on. Luckily, at this event my style was undeniably well received and I made many new contacts, gave away plenty of stickers and business cards, and even sold some prints & jewelry. It was an amazing time and the show turned out to be a huge success for everyone involved. Additionally, a small posse of my Eastern MA crew turned out to show their TLC. <3 <3 <3

The best part for me was just sitting back and watching peoples' reactions to my work. Dozens of kids whipped out their smart phones to take pictures of my taxidermy and turtle-hide boxes. For some reason I love the thought of my art being passed around the internet, even if my name isn't plastered across every single snap shot. Of course, a part of me wants to hoard every last bit of recognition and credit, but a larger part of me is happy to remain anonymous.

Now here's a bunch of pictures from the past year.  Thank you, everyone, for your support, encouragement, critiques, and love.

My display @ Free Art Show

The creative taxidermy of Chupacabra Crafts

I painted some foam core and made a display!

My paintings about to be framed...

Squirrel Foot boxes

Made my own stickers!

My latest mount!

The artist at work...

Feeling Chipper

I threw myself into chipmunks for the sake of an adorable little boy who hunted one down about a month ago. My boyfriend and I were actually visiting an old, local-ish, professional taxidermist who had made us a gorgeous black bear rug from last season. We visited his studio - a barn in the beautiful, autumn Western Mass countryside - and I was able to pick his brain about taxidermy methods and licsensure application info.

On our way out we happened upon the elder taxidermist's son and young grandson. The kid was proudly showing off the female chipmunk he just hunted with his own rifle. He pleaded with his grandpa to stuff it for him (his younger sister was horrified), but the man proclaimed "they're just too small, it can't be done. At least not by my old eyes." The boy was clearly dissapointed, but I excitedly jumped at the chance to prove my budding skills.

"I can do it!"  And so I claimed my first true hunter and customer.

So for the past few weeks I've been working on eastern chipmunks Tamias striatus. They are amazingly difficult to stuff successfully, given their diminutive size and thin skin.  It was easy to see why even experienced taxidermists would avoid them. In 3 weeks,  however,  I was able to mount 3 chipmunks - 2 of which came out good enough to post pictures of!

The following is a general breakdown of my technique:

Make a plan: Envision what the final piece will (hopefully) look like by drawing a few simple sketches. Sketching helps me center myself and get into art mode.

Organize your materials:  Mannikins of several sizes, 'munk pelt, wad of critter clay, cotton balls, instruments, needles & thread. A few things I wish I'd put in this photo are: small paint brushes, paint, glass eyes, and a product called "bird foot injection fluid".

Figure out how to the get pelt on the mannikin: As far as I can tell, and even according to the pro I spoke with, this often involves breaking the legs off the mannikin. This time it occoured to me to make subtle notches in the limbs to help them fit snugly back together. The little boy's chipmunk also had a bullet hole in one of its arm pits which turned out to be a great place to insert the severed forearms.

After the forearms are in place carefully insert the rest of the mannikin. (in the case of these 'munks the hind legs didn't need to be removed.) This is a difficult step and it is easy to fuck up and tear the wet skin or rip the fur out. 

Carve out the eye sockets of the form, insert black bubble eyes.

Using a combination of clay and cotton balls, I built up the brow, under eye, nose, ear bases, whisker roots, cheeks and lower jaw.  Using tweezers I insert small balls of clay or cotton under the wet skin and work them into shape. This is my favorite part of the taxidermy process; trying to create a lifelike expression. 

However I'm still trying to learn to add enough clay compensate for the natural shrinkage that occurs as the mount dries. Their faces look perfect at first, but begin to warp and tighten over the first several days post-creation. Adding to this dilema, when the skin is first mounted (and I double checked this with our bear rug maker) it should be sopping wet and workable, that is, saturated with water and slightly pudgier than it would be if still alive. Maintaining the look of realism through out the wet-to-dry process still needs to be mastered. 

So.... I got lazy stopped taking pictures of the final steps. That can wait for future posts. What's missing are positioning the paws and tail with clay and wire, injecting foot-preservation fluid (smells awful, a mask must be worn) into the paw pads, and painting a bit of color around the mouth and eyelids. Time it sit back and enjoy the fuzzy fruits of my labor. Thanks for reading :)

This one's pelt ripped. Patched it up with chicken-patterned paper.

Spooky & Kid Stuff

The Faces of Progress

Just completed my fourth squirrel mount, which is also my fifth work of taxidermy for the summer! This piece, dubbed Wednesday,  I will confidently claim, turned out really really good:

Looking over the whole group, particularly the details of the faces, my progression in the hobby is most pleasing...lol to me. Perhaps most importantly, I am perfecting the early but vital step of removing the skin from the skull without damaging the inner ears, eyelids, whisker roots, nose and lips. Of these features, the eyelids are probably the most easily damaged and easily observable. On poor Lord Julius, for example, I skinned/fleshed the left side of his face respectably, but utterly butchered his right side:

Lord Juilius IV, Order of the StumpTail

Ouch!

However, Wednesday's eye-setting came out beautifully. Two distinct improvements in craftsmanship added to her success. Firstly, I carved the eye sockets much deeper into the mannikin before gluing the glass eyes in place. The epoxy-foam mannikins come with shallow eye sockets, but its up to the artist to detail them to the individual specimen in a (hopefully) realistic manner. The other new technique that worked well was stuffing the brow with tiny bits of cotton after I'd slid the hide more-or-less in place.


A few weeks after Julius, I got a roadkill connect that turned out to have been a lactating female with a pretty shitty quality pelt to begin with. However, for the sake of practice I took the animal and experimentally stuffed it pillow-style, without any sort of mannikin or wire frame, just to see what the final product would look like. She ended up essentially still looking like roadkill, but quite deserving of a place on the internet:

As for my third squirrel, I decided to get creative (I'm having a hard time convincing myself to make "normal" looking mounts) and pose him holding his own heart, preserved in a little jar. Thus, I carefully cut out his heart and preserved it in a small glass jar of 70% alcohol. The jar was an empty paint jar form the art supply store.  Now preserving rodent hearts in tiny jars is something I've been dabbling in since college. After 3 or 4 days/alcohol changes, the heart tissue, still submerged in EtOH, was fixed.

Things were going well on #3 until it was time to close up his ventral incision. The hide simply wasn't big enough, possibly because I'd gotten lazy and had let the hide dry out completely before rehydrating (soaking it in briny water overnight) and mounting it. But I was not discouraged, in fact this was the perfect excuse to make the final creation nice and strange. I debated between carving the exposed foam to look like the underlying anatomy or something a bit more.... whimsical.

With the recent success of FunnyBunny, I decided to take a similar route with this squirrel, i.e. to my trove of decoupage materials. A Victorian-like black & white flower-patterned sheet of paper was selected. I used just a small portion of the sheet and tore it up randomly to get the look I wanted. Next came the modge podging, which proceeded in two layers; a base layer of the less attractive paper scraps, followed by a select group of scraps carefully placed over the torso to give the impression of the rodent's original organs. In the end, it was a huge success:

He needs a name.

heart-in-a-jar

I carved him a pleasant smile.

And that brings us up to Wednesday, who is thus far the beauty of my collection. I crafted her in essentially the same manner as Julius; that is mannikin + cotton filler. In this case my boyfriend and I picked out an interesting mannikin in a climbing down, turning slightly to the left pose. One thing I prepped for was arm breakage. In this instance it occurred to me to try cutting off the mannikin's arms at the shoulders and inserting them into the skin's leg holes first. This actually turned out to be a great strategy and I was able to mount the hide fairly quickly.

There isn't much more to add to her story at the moment, though we are on the look out for the right base or log to put her on. Don't mind the cotton visible in the pics below, she's still drying. Other than some lower lip shrinkage and some hair-slip at the base of the tail, the finished piece looks fantastic. Wednesday also came with her own ear notches, which I think adds to her natural charm.

Humble Beginnings

As a child I was always fascinated by the macabre. My first encounter with taxidermy was in a bait & tackle shop with my dad. I don't recall exactly how old I was, but we'd walk into this shop and right in the entryway was a gorgeous stuffed mountain goat. He appeared to be strolling in, right along with the customers.You could dig your fingers into his thick fur, touch his knobby horns, or stare into his lifelike glass eyes. The store also had a full mount snarling brown bear, deer and moose heads and dozens of fish. But the trotting, friendly, white goat was my favorite.

My parents would take my younger brother and I to the Harvard Museum of Natural History  where I'd spend hours walking the collections of stuffed mammals, birds, insects, and ocean creatures. It was so impressive to see the exotic menagerie, but I wanted to know how They did it. "How does one stuff an entire tiger?" My 8 year old self vowed to find out...

20 years later & I'm in a good place. Stable income and a loving boyfriend who supports and even contributes to my strange hobbies.  He is an avid hunter (I've gone on a few expeditions as well) and has a chest freezer with several deer hides he wants to learn to tan and make into clothing. Thus, over the last few years I've been doing a good deal of self-directed online research into preserving hides and taxidermy techniques.

There are many steps involved in processing even a small animal hide. After slowly and carefully removing the skin from the body it must be salted, scraped or fleshed out, pickled in an acid bath, fleshed again, briefly re-pickled, neutralized, dried, tanned with more chemicals, rinsed, dried and worked in a manner that breaks the skin's protein structure to produce a soft, cloth-like material. And that's JUST for a flat pelt.  Molding and mounting the pelt over a pre-made animal form to create a "stuffed" taxidermy piece is another skill set entirely. So, suffice to say I learned pretty quickly that one does not simply Get Into taxidermy!