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.

Funny Bunny

Minor update: After much feedback I decided to patch him up with some spare printed canvas:

From lawnmower victim to adorable desktop companion...

This tiny cottontail was an accidental victim of the grounds department where my bf and I work...he was thoughtful enough to acquire it for me ^.^

Here's something I'm quickly learning about taxidermy: tiny animals are fucking difficult. Their skin is very thin to begin with and the tanning process can ruin the strength if not done extremely carefully (I over-neutralized a squirrel pelt recently and large patches of fur fell out). Never-the-less this little fellow came out pretty good, minus the gaping tear in his right side. The rabbit kit was skinned, the feet and adorable little tail were left on, and into the pickle jar it went. The skin was so thin it clearly pickled through in only about 2 hours. 

A first I tried simply stuffing the sock-like bunny with just cotton balls, but it didn't hold much of a shape.  I pulled out most of the cotton balls, except for the neck and head which looked decent and was starting to dry in place. I then constructed a lovely little wire frame and messed with it and the cotton balls until, after a few solid hours of work, I had recreated the baby bunny. 

Squirrel in the Living Room!

Pleased to announce the results of my first attempt at a life-sized taxidermy mount!

Ooooooo!

I spent most of July 4th hanging out with friends in my backyard; grilling, celebrating, and putting this guy together. Lord Julius IV: Order of the StumpTail a.k.a Mr. Fuzzynuts was found whilst cleaning out a basement  freezer, leftover from last fall's grey squirrel season. He had taken some serious shotgun damage to his right eye socket and was missing most of his tail to begin with, but I figured what the heck good enough to practice a first piece! And so the squirrel was thawed, pelted, and pickled. 

Pickling

At this point I've skinned enough small mammals that it was fairly simple to get the hide off and mix the very acidic hide preserving solution. Since I didn't have a specific pose for the mount in mind, a case incision was used to remove the skin in one piece. A squirrel hock-to-squirrel hock cut was made, passing under the base of the tail, along the grey-white fur line. This was to ensure that the final stitches wouldn't be seen by the audience.  After about an hour the skin  -including all 4 feet, ears, nose and whiskers- was freed from the body. It peeled off a bit like a tube sock. As the skin soaked overnight, I picked out a pretty generic mannikin, or foam taxidermy form, and several sizes of glass rodent eyes. 

One big mistake I made overall was failing to measure the whole animal from nose to the base of the tail, and the width and length of the eyes prior to skinning. When the foam body arrived and I excitedly began putting the skin on, it quickly became obvious that the hide (basically sopping wet after being rinsed/neutralized of acid and coated/rinsed again of hide tanning agent) was about 3 inches too long to fit snuggly against the form. The squirrel's rear end hung limply off the foam body like a tattered cloth. In addition the arms and legs of the animal looked disproportionately long when affixed to the nubs of the mannikin. Admittedly, I was feeling pretty discouraged at this point. Despite reading and re-reading the Mannual, there seemed to be just too many fine nuances to taxidermy art to simply describe to a novice. For example: just exactly how much bone and tendon should one leave intact in the paws in order to balance shape, correct preservation, and still avoiding rot? I sat back for a while and debated how best to proceed. However, time was limited as the hide began to dry to the form and needed to be shaped into a final lifelike position...

Tanned,  hydrated hide and mannikin with foot glued back on

While struggling to mount the hide I stupidly snapped off the bottom right paw of the mannikin. The moderately brittle foam crumbled apart in my hand and all I could do was sit back and groan in frustration. While waiting for the glue to dry on the severed foot my mind scrolled through all the animal-stuffing techniques I'd been reading about. Around the house there was a decent collection of wire, glues, cardboard, and clay, but I didn't have the straw or sawdust old timers used for making taxidermy forms. As I worked outside on the deck, friends stopped by to inspect my progress and I smiled awkwardly, pretending to be in control of the situation.

After a good half hour of thinking it over I came up with a plan of action. Basically, it was a crude combination of all the methods I had been reading or youtube-ing. At this stage the face skin had been drying in place nicely and I didn't want to undo it. The mannikin was wearing the skin like a hooded cloak. I went back and snapped off all four paws. Then I used 22 gauge wire to fashion four 6" long arm and leg frames which were stuffed back up under the hide, in its "armpits". I began stuffing cotton balls as far as I could up into the armpits, trying to hold the wire in place without glue. Surprisingly it worked as I had hoped and the little beast's right forearm came back to life in proportion (more or less) and semi flexible.... there was hope after all!

I excitedly finished the other three limbs in the same manner. Bulking up his waist with cotton was the next step, probably the most fun and amusing part of the project. I then sculpted the overall shape of the animal by pushing and sculpting the pelt and cotton around by hand. When I was satisfied with the body composition I gently sewed up the original incision sight. I also worked the ears, nose, whiskers and lips into their final shape. His right eyelid was long gone so I couldn't get really creative with eye expression, but his lower lip was a different story. I gave him a comical gasping expression, representing my first attempt at mounting a small animal that was full of unexpected challenges.

All in all I spent close to 5 hours straight taxidermy-ing this grey squirrel. Later that night I realized we had tanned a spare tail from another squirrel my hubby had also shot last season. I carefully fed a piece of wire into it and tied it tightly to the mount's tail stub.  I adjusted the tail to a pleasant S shape and the piece instantly seemed to take on a new life. "Squirrel in the living room!" I thought at last.

 The next day I was looking the mount over and came to the realization that he needed teeth. At first I tried clipping the teeth out of an old vole skull, but they turned out to be much too small to fill the squirrel's mouth convincingly. (I also had painted the inside of the mouth greyish-brown, along with a few patches of missing fur) The solution was clearly to make some incisors out of sculpy, and after a few layers of paint he had some fairly convincing dentures. Just a hint cartoony, but that's how I like it.


Lord Julius IV, Order of the StumpTail

Dental Plan

patch of fur slip :(

Party UP

Facelift for a Classic Souvenir

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.

A Surprise Taxidermy Pick!

This weekend my boyfriend surprised me with a visit to pick his coworker's father's garage for vintage taxidermy pieces and parts. The man had been an avid deer hunter & antler collector. He had dozens of beautiful antler sheds, mounted antlers, and unfinished wooden mounting panels he'd made during his younger years. He had some rather deteriorated 1960s era whitetail and pronghorn neck mounts and we decided to adopt the whitetails. One has a crumbling apart nose, but the other is in decent shape and we were able to dust him off, polish his eyes and antlers, and display him in the living room.

The generous man who allowed us access to the items was very thankful to pass on his father's belonging to others who would clean them up and display them for the next generation. We spent a good portion of the afternoon touring the old house and listening to the histories of our 'new' treasures. If you've ever seen the TV show American Pickers and heard the property owners' nostalgic tales of the items for sale, it was exactly like that. We left feeling proud to help the man out and give a new purpose to his father's collection. I left with the hoard shown below, and with big ideas for how respectfully incorporate it into my artwork and theoretical craft fair booth.

Drafting

Based on a sketch from 2011!!

 I'd been hoping to make a better, more finalized version from the outset....You ever, as a kid, pick up a hamster at a pet store or a friend's house, finding it ridiculously adorable -- minus the giant, bulbus testicles? In honor of pet rodents everywhere, I present thee: