So how did this all start?
My dear friend Ben has a cabin on one of the NY finger lakes and he has done up the main room like an old Adirondack hunting lodge. Lots of stuffed dead stuff on the walls and in curio cabinets.
So I thought.... hmmmm I would like some of that at my cottage in Canada! Hmm seems that its hard to take dead stuffed animals over the boarder. No one is selling their stuffed dead stuff up by the cottage. Seems they like to keep them on the walls also.
I didn't want to go hunting, kill something and then get it stuffed. That's too cruel.
Frustration.... leads to invention. Looking around and thinking for a while I realized that the forest was stuffed with things that would work as material to make me some animal heads. Birch bark was readily available and the first nations used it for everything.
First try was to do a paper folding idea. So got some 3D modeling software and imported a moose head (why go small?). Used the output to put into Pepakura software and then printed out tons of huge paper templates. Well I then spent a week working on trying to score thin sheets of birch bark to get my moose sculpture. WAY TOO HARD! Gave up for the year.
Next year I tried to create a head by using a leather stitching awl. Well that didn't work so well. Birch bark is like leather but its way to stiff and resistant to punctures. Seems that I was putting more holes in my palm than in the birch bark. To hard to hold everything together and stitch while trying to create a moose head shape.
Now the third year at the cottage was the charm. I decided to use insulation foam to carve a deer head form. I could have purchased one from a taxidermy supply place but that would be cheating. So I got the right 3M glue and got to work.
So now I had form that would work as my base. Now to start using a really good hot glue gun and archival glue.
After the form was covered with enough birch bark I then split the birch bark and opened it up and removed it carefully from the form.
More work to add a back brace and then on to the antlers.
My dear friend Ben has a cabin on one of the NY finger lakes and he has done up the main room like an old Adirondack hunting lodge. Lots of stuffed dead stuff on the walls and in curio cabinets.
So I thought.... hmmmm I would like some of that at my cottage in Canada! Hmm seems that its hard to take dead stuffed animals over the boarder. No one is selling their stuffed dead stuff up by the cottage. Seems they like to keep them on the walls also.
I didn't want to go hunting, kill something and then get it stuffed. That's too cruel.
Frustration.... leads to invention. Looking around and thinking for a while I realized that the forest was stuffed with things that would work as material to make me some animal heads. Birch bark was readily available and the first nations used it for everything.
First try was to do a paper folding idea. So got some 3D modeling software and imported a moose head (why go small?). Used the output to put into Pepakura software and then printed out tons of huge paper templates. Well I then spent a week working on trying to score thin sheets of birch bark to get my moose sculpture. WAY TOO HARD! Gave up for the year.
Next year I tried to create a head by using a leather stitching awl. Well that didn't work so well. Birch bark is like leather but its way to stiff and resistant to punctures. Seems that I was putting more holes in my palm than in the birch bark. To hard to hold everything together and stitch while trying to create a moose head shape.
Now the third year at the cottage was the charm. I decided to use insulation foam to carve a deer head form. I could have purchased one from a taxidermy supply place but that would be cheating. So I got the right 3M glue and got to work.
So now I had form that would work as my base. Now to start using a really good hot glue gun and archival glue.
After the form was covered with enough birch bark I then split the birch bark and opened it up and removed it carefully from the form.
More work to add a back brace and then on to the antlers.
Here is the finished deer head in the ROCO members show. Got a nice award and sold it the first day of the opening. Yee Haa.
No comments:
Post a Comment