Teddy's human contacted me months ago- while I was at sea actually- to inquire about my services for her ailing buddy. When I saw the word 'hairless" in her email, I immediately backed away from the computer. Well, I tried to explain to her that I am not versed in that depratment and may wind up totally ruining her rat. "Well, no, he has some hair" she wrote back, trying to convince me. SOME hair? Well why didn't you just say so? What the heck. I agreed to give Teddy the Diamond Tooth treatment.
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Not Teddy but a sample.[/caption]Turns out, as far as I'm concerened, that some hair makes for a more difficult mount than no hair at all. Once I had the skin tanned, stretched and sewed up on the custom made form, it looked decent.
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custom form with Teddy's jaw bone, in progress[/caption]I knew what was coming though- once the skin dried, it became transparent and yellowy, nothing like Teddy's original whitish/pink/grey hue. His jaw bone was visible through his skin, as was the foam form it was mounted upon.
Not pretty. Feeling optimistic, however, I jsut figured I'd use this opporuntity to really hone my airbrushign skills.
HA! How naive of me. All the paint jsut got cuaght up in the hair and my feeble atteplts to spray around the hair with an elaborate series of combs, pick, etc just made a mess. Ooooookay.... maybe I'll hand paint him.
Even worse. I tried different brushes, thinned out paints, varied my application technique, wiped it all off and started over. Again, and again. I reached out to my trusty online taxidermist forum in vain. I emailed another owman in my field for any advice she may have, and what I got was some commiseration and empathy which may have don the trick.
Basically, I just kept at it. I also tried a different kind of color- more of an ink than a paint, per se, adn when paired with my super intense method of spraying, wiping, dry and wet brush combo application, I got a rat mount that resembled Teddy again.
He used to play with wooden blocks so his human brought me thos eto include in the mount,
