We picked up this little fellow at a yard sale the other day. You may have seen these minimally processed dried pufferfish in sea shell stores at various ocean vacation locales. Typically, they are stuffed with cotton and finished with
googly eyes, a string to hang them from, and/or a little straw hat. Come to think of it, I may have some left over from childhood lurking around my folks' house....
This was a simple notion that sprung into my head several months ago. I was hoping to buy one of these dried puffers over the summer, but unexpectedly stumbled upon this guy instead. The idea is just to give him a "face lift" or change of expression by replacing the standard googly eyes with high quality glass fish eyes from the taxidermy supplier.
The first step was to clean him up with a damp paper towel. You can see how dusty he was in the first picture. Cotton was also spilling out of his mouth and had to be poked back down into his gullet. His tail fin had several tears in it and I was contemplating soaking the tail and trying to repair it, but decided to just leave it as is. Without knowing how the dead fish was preserved, I couldn't estimate how well it would tolerate full rehydration and clearly I didn't want to risk causing the piece to rot...
I carefully pried off the original eyes using a dull scalpel blade. Next, I tried out various pairs of glass eyes that had been ordered from a
taxidermy supplier. Several weeks beforehand I selected a dozen pairs of fish, reptile, and novelty eyes just to have around the house for when Inspiration hit.
In the end I chose 10mm alligator eyes because of their soft, green hue and slightly evil gaze. They were about 4mm larger than his googlies, and at first gave him a really bugged out appearance. It was obviously to me that they needed sockets, which I delicately cut out. All said & done, the whole craft took about half an hour and the results were quite impressive, in my opinion. His name is now Lord Puffington V.
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