tiger is almost finished

Replica claws - painted and ready to glue!
Finished! Now for the felting.
I need felt. Rawr.

tiger update - 2010

Examples of tests - gluing, color matching with airbrushing, creating perfectly-shaped fills.
Water damage removed, some examples of holes.
This hole took me a day to fill.
The result - can you see it? (hint - near the left of the tail)
Take a closer look.

Tiger is looking beautiful! The fills look good and the airbrushing is really challenging but rewarding. The old felt has been removed and some preliminary lining has been glued into place around the fills that are completed.

February entails: (haha) more fills, more airbrushing and gluing, lining, re-felting, claw replacement.

American Museum of Natural History

I'm interning this summer at AMNH and I am working on fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, textiles, luxury goods, etc. for the Turfan Marketplace scene in the November-opening Silk Road exhibition.
I am mostly making faux fruit look more realistic by sculpting onto them or painting them, or both. I am also sculpting things from scratch as well as making molds and casts of real fruits and veggies.
Here are some examples of the work I am doing.
These bananas are 1/2 finished. They've come in as generic plastic things, and by this point I have sculpted new stems and ends onto them, and airbrushed them a bit. They are missing the top parts in this photo.
These apples have been primed because when we got them they were a silly red color. Soon they will be painted, all the stems removed and replaced with real wood.
Finished apples. Hand painted.
SO MANY APPLES.
1/2 finished figs. These were all the same so I cut them up and put them back together to vary the sizes. Then I sculpted new stems on a few of them. I painted them here, but they are still missing their detail work in this stage.
Closer to being finished, but not quite.
Finished bananas.

In most cases, I am given the species of the fruit, and told to figure out what that looks like, then go from the research I do. Sometimes the designers give me exact reference.

With these apricots, I just had to make them vary in color. The shapes and textures were pretty believable.
Sometimes there is miscommunication, for example, like when the designers said "golden peaches" I found reference online saying that golden peaches were a deep red, when infact they are more yellow than apricots. I will start a new batch of peaches next week, but here are the ones I made. They came a light pink color and I painted them red and yellow.
WRONG!
These watermelons are going to be in a lead ice chest that one of the artists is making, and another artist is painting the watermelons. I sculped the stems because the ones that came on them were made of floral tape and wire. In this photo, they are of course, unpainted, but I will photograph them later when they are in the ice chest.
These plums are weird and made of silicone, I just dusted them up to make them look more realistic.
I finally remembered to take a before and after shot.
BEFORE
AFTER

This is seaweed I made from thermoplastic and a heat gun, paint and chalk.


BEFORE
I airbrushed all these, one at a time.
AFTER

And I airbrushed these too.

My next tasks involve sculpting indian gooseberries, and peepul figs, and then casting them so that I only have to sculpt about 5 of each, then painting them.
There's so much more to do!

Jan 29 2009 - antler plaque, deer, turkey head

THURSDAY

Today was a crazy day. There was a lot to do, and a lot to listen to.
This is my antler plaque. It's usually done for smaller sets of antlers that would be considered unnecessary to mount the whole deer. The white is a leather and the black is just braided ropes. There were a variety of colors to choose from but I stuck to pretty contrasty colors.

I also had to upholster the bottom of my deer mount because it is a wall pedestal. It sits off the wall in a way where you can kind of see underneath it. The white is leather with quilt bedding under it. The t-pins and staples hold it in place and it drums across the form.
Finished! But upside-down.
Finished, right side up.
Brenda's hog - she is going to flesh it and turn the ears tomorrow. (That is hard on a deer, and harder on a hog.) Here's a short video of it:


We painted turkey heads today. I didn't feel like spending $45 on an artificial head or $75 on a freeze dried head, so I painted an extra one that Chip had in the shop, and I won't get to keep it. I'm not terribly heartbroken.
Believe it or not, this is actually the colors they are.
Colors in a bottle.
Painted, glossed, spotted and finished fish! The bass will belong to Mom and Dad, and the trout is for Mimi and Papa. Enjoy! (Finished meaning they lack bases. But I think I'll do those when I get home from school because it would be dumb to ship a piece of driftwood.)

We sat for a long time today and listened to Chip talk about tanning processes and other things that are very important. I took so many notes, I could practically write a short story about the history of tanning. Apparently, you can boil out a deers brain and tan the hide with the brain juice. You can also just pee on the cape and that's called a urine tan. Both of those methods are not used anymore, but actually work.

Today we watched Chip skin a life sized mount. We got ours already tanned, so we needed to learn how to actually skin. We used Dave's fox as an example. It was really interesting. I kept the fox's skull. It is a grey fox and it is beautiful. It was at first a little weird because I kind of fell in love with the fox when it was not skinned, I examined it for about ten minutes, looking at the way it was all put together and feeling how its ears were attached, how its eyes fell around the inner membranes. I looked at the lips and counted the raised spots on the insides and noticed exactly how the teeth fit together. I touched its legs and feet and felt the tendons and how they worked to move the ends of the legs. Seeing it skinned was weird but instantly turned intereststing. It's actually pretty difficult, especially when it comes to flipping the ears inside out and laying out the skin around the nose, eyes and mouth flat so that when you tan it, you don't miss any spots.

!!!


The following images and videos are of Chip skinning the fox. Don't watch them if you don't want to see it. The photos below will also be graphic. I'll make them small so they aren't gorey, but you can click on them to make them larger.

!!!

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VIDEOS - if you listen, it's kinda funny. It's not one of the more hilarious moments, but what we talk about is just kinda ... boring. I guess there isn't much to do while we are just ... watching this.

Jan 28 2009 - fox, bass, trout

I arrived at 8am and left at 7:45pm. LONG DAY

First of all, let me first say that I am sorry for the delay of the following image. This is the fridge where the most recently-being-worked-on deer capes are kept, and where we put our lunches when we come in the morning.
My lunch is on the top left. That's the lucky spot. Sometimes it gets moved to the goo-water on the bottom right. This is not ideal.

Today, Carrie made apple danishes.

We began today with painting our life-sizes.
We hit the ears with black and shaped them up.
We hit the nose with black, too. Then with matte gel all over, and gloss gel in the nostrils to have the nose appear wet.


To begin with the fish, we had to gloss them outside with an aerosol can of "super fish shine."
Julie and Brenda wait to spray their fish.
Julie took these of me. I am holding HER fish because mine were inside already. I am laughing because I teased her about how I didn't want to claim them as my own.

The paint schedules for the fish are similar at first, but then differ as you build up colors with the airbrush. If you get too much on or mess up, you have to start over with white. There are nine colors on each fish. Some of the colors are sprays in general areas, but some are detail work.
The trout is on the top, the bass below.

The trout is almost done - it needs a darker line on the top, plus its black spots. You can do those with sharpie or a paintbrush. Airbrush spotting is hard because of those "freak drops" and other accidents.

In this photo, the bass is completely painted. This eye protect is still on so his nice glass eyes are covered underneath. The trout has some spots but will have much more by tomorrow. In fact, I am painting them for homework. Tomorrow, we will put a high gloss on them that will make them look wet.

Tomorrow and Friday are going to be absolutely crazy. We have to build bases for our mounts, finish our antler plaques, and I have to sew some leather to the under side of my deer mount.

This is a video of what it looked like outside as we sprayed our fish with sealer.


This is a video of Missouri Taxidermy's showroom. It's the room you come in when you enter the building. The office is straight ahead, to the left is the work room and classroom area, and up the stairs is where Chip and Carrie and Cam and Caleb live. Oh my, that's a bunch of C names. Just picked up on that.


WOW! Jonas sent me a link to Kate Clark's work ... totally inspiring and disturbing.