Mountain Goat 1

It is with mixed emotions that I am starting on the animal heads in the library.  I am not a fan of big game hunting or killing animals for sport, and that’s one thing about Teddy Roosevelt I’m not fond of.  On the other hand, miniature taxidermy fascinates me, and, to make the library accurate, I need the mounted heads. I wish I could do what Brae did in her wonderful miniature taxidermy shop, and claim that all the animals are actually living animals who are just holding still for the picture :-), but it’s a little hard to do that with heads and rugs.  So, I took a deep breath and got started.

My original plan was to use G scale animals.  Preiser makes animals that are supposed to be G scale.  They are mostly out of stock everywhere, but I finally found a snow goat on eBay.  When it came, I realized I couldn’t use it, for several reasons:

1.  It is too big.  Seriously, snow goats are not the size of cows, Preiser.

2.  The head is turned at an angle.

3.  It appears to be made of some hard, hollow plastic that I’m afraid would shatter if I tried to cut it.

     4.  It turns out I can’t stand the thought of cutting the head off even a plastic animal.

I next looked for charms or beads, since that had worked so well on the lion skin rugs.  Unfortunately, the only goat’s head charms I could find were either skulls or had Satanic symbols on them (not the look I was going for). 

Finally, I decided that I would have to try my hand at polymer clay.  As I’ve mentioned several times, this is definitely not my métier, but I found that having the 3-D example of the Preiser goat helped.

Here is try number one.  I really liked the way it turned out, but, even though it is a bit smaller than the Preiser goat, it is not small enough.  Darn!

Here is try number two.  A much better size.  I don’t know that he turned out quite as well as my first try, but it was a little harder working at a smaller size.  His right ear broke off, so I ended up redoing it.  (I had to build up the bottom of the base a bit anyway.)  This time, I used liquid Sculpey to fill in the joins and, I hope, make them stronger.

When he had cooled and I had sanded and trimmed him a bit, I painted him.  You can see I used a variety of paints.  I like mixing them in water bottle caps, which I save for a number of miniature purposes.  The horns had an undercoat of the Country Twill.  That paint was quite thick, but I ran my brush across the horns horizontally, and the thicker paint gave the horns a bit of ridged texture.  After that paint had dried, I went over it with a wash of black thinned with water.

Then I added his eyes, which are black microbeads.

His coat was made from white DMC 6-strand floss.  For the longer pieces, I separated single strands of floss into their two parts, then ran them through my wet fingers to straighten out the kinks.  

These were then cut into pieces about 1/8” long.  The flock was cut from regular single strands of DMC floss.  No pictures of this, since I need both hands to do it.  This is definitely the most tedious part of the process.

I tried to follow Kerri Pajutee’s excellent tutorial for flocking, but I couldn’t pat things down as flat and even as she does.  Nevertheless, I did get my little guy flocked and “furred,” and I think he turned out OK.

Here he is in the room—temporarily.  He won’t go up permanently until the ceiling is in place, and I’ve taken him down now and am putting him in a nice, safe place until it’s time to put him up, because he is rather delicate.

Now I just have another goat head, a gazelle head and a boar head to do.  :-P

 

As you might have noticed in the Preiser goat picture, I have been working hard on filling the bookshelves.  It’s a slow process.  Each shelf is taking around 14 books to fill, but I am getting there.

And, finally, although Christmas is over, I wanted to show you the picture of the Christmas Eve smorgasbord in the Merrimack.

The ham is from Mountain Miniatures, the cookies are from Sue’s Little Things on eBay, you already know about the eggs, and the rest of the items (including the rather odd looking salmon and lefse) I made myself.

A Happy New Year to you all, with lots of joy, wonder, and miniature treasures!