If taxidermy bothers or upsets you, please do not read this post.
If you've followed my work at all, you may have noticed that I use real fur and tails in some of my pieces. I have a soft spot for dead fuzzy things. Most people see this as morbid or weird or gross (or all of the above). One of my favorite Christmas gifts was a coyote face from my dad. My collection has expanded to include faces from several species (coyote, fox, badger, opossum, raccoon), tails (coyote, fox, raccoon, bobcat, mink), and full pelts (raccoon, opossum, ermine). For a while I also had a professionally mounted raccoon and squirrel.
Why?, you ask. Well, I'm not sure. I'm an animal lover. I've donated a whole heck of a lot of money to different wildlife organizations, and am all for preserving our wildlife. But taxidermy fascinates me. It always has. 
So I'm considering doing my own taxidermy mount. Not a traditional mount (like our bear friend above). But a soft mount. Meaning the head is mounted in the traditional way, but the body is soft and plush like a stuffed animal. There are several artists on Deviant Art who do these soft mounts, and I'd love to give it a try. They are made from an already tanned pelt and the results are beautiful.
This is a gorgeous example of a soft mount. This one is by FoxyCreations. She is credited on Deviant Art as being the first to really do the soft mount. Her work is amazing!
If I do start my own, I will be taking pictures and blogging the process.
5 comments:
Never been a huge fan of taxidermy only because I'm weirded out enough with humans staring at me. But I have a friend that did that to a couple of her pets. I've never seen soft mount before, kind of interesting. I've got a double fox wrap that my great-grandfather made start to finish for my grandmother and I love it and the amount of craftsmanship that went into its creation.
Good luck on your new venture :)
Oh, lord, my cats would do terrible things to anything taxidermied. I have one of those double mink wraps that belonged to my grandma, and Franklin got it down from the shelf in the closet one night and tried to kill it. Doesn't weird me out, and I know you would do really interesting things with it.
taxidermy always makes me think of "Psycho". Remember all the taxidermy animals he had in his office! totally creepy but, oddly enough, I'm not generally creeped out by taxidermy. My dad is a biologist and we had all kinds of weird animal things around our house. Can't wait to see what you come up with.
I would appreciate more visual materials, to make your blog more attractive, but your writing style really compensates it. But there is always place for improvement
Hi,I've just chanced on this post in a Google search, please can you say if you did do a soft mount and posted on it?
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