I Think I Got It

 Good old pen and ink.

I had not used a quill pen for decades, since art school, but the very fine line and skerchy noise when I drew got me there!!!  I also found using white paint with the brush gave me a lot of definition.  This hair clip, with shellac and a bit of putty to conceal the means of attaching the clip, is the winner

It is a bit over 4" wide and I used a touch of oil paint, to stain the nose and eyes.  That is the novelty to this technique.  I foresaw toning the surface for many other pieces, for emphasis and local color.

This piece, which was from a random piece of gourd, became a stand alone piece of art, using pen.  It is about 8" across.

closer

First Tries

 

MY FIRST RHINO

It is about 5" tall on a top of a gourd that I thought looked all the world like a whale's tooth!  But is was clunky.  The brush was good for rendering but it looks painted on there.  It does not have the refinement I loved in the lines of my ivory work.   It was close.

I learned that it did need sealing.  That was some experimenting too.  I knew a spray sealer would be best, but after trying urethane, simple charcoal sealant, lacquer and varnish, I felt old fashioned shellac was the most natural and gave a warmth that the modern sealants just didn't.  

I felt I was near to the idea.  I loved the look of line on the warm gold of the gourd.  I liked the ability to make it look old and has a great affinity to wildlife. 

The Idea

 With a bag full of broken gourds, I came back from her mobile home in Yuma and was determined to revive my love of scrimshaw.

And it was not as easy as it looked...

I used to use a sharp tool, made of carborundum, as I recall, made for scratching metal for manufacturing.  It was in a pen shell, but hard and sharp. The original Scrimshanders used sharpened sail needles and spit and ash from the fireplace.  In the years intervening, I lost my scribe. I tried to buy some other sharp objects but I realized I was NOT going to be able to make the same marks.  It would appear the gourd, even old, hard and dry, was not going to keep scratches viable for inking. 

 Nothing stuck, 

Not in the scratch nor did it even seem to stain the surface.... so I tossed my old technique. 

It was however, lovely drawing on them for the initial sketch in pencil.

Very hard to see, but it is easy to pencil and easy to erase.  I found that printing the image about the same size and just sight sizing it was far easier than my initial attempt at transferring it, as I was doing with a lot of other crafts.

I collected my first images at the Phoenix Zoo so I had original subjects to put on my pieces.  BUT how....

My earlier pieces used tiny brushes. I had a small collection of them that I had been using in my previous career as a manicurist.  I was a bit well known as a manual muralist, as I called myself.  TINY brushes with image spread across the hand.  I had prizes in competition that were larger than even ME!  

A few of the saved images....

 My poor model literally lifted them off with nail polish remover and dental floss!!!

This was a practice piece homage to stamps!

Even at this scale, the detail was a bit lacking but it might work if I tried it in monochrome.....

The Quest

 As a young artist, I was employed in a sweatshop "scrimming" beasts and flowers on cabochons of ivory for trinket jewelry. 

 Edi Amin was shooting elephants off the back of his jeep and shipping the tusks to us and others.  Not long after I left the laws regulating the heinous practice was outlawed.  

I did this in lieu of painting deGrasia images on bells.  It was an amazing skill. I learned about the traditions of scrimshaw and our expedited technique of scratching through a thin layer of india ink on the ivory, then rubbing it back into the scratches and wiping, then buffing back to reveal only the lines, beat out the traditional technique of rubbing soot in the lines on the rib bones and ivory tusks of whales.

My fellow artists were wonderful and I did the "wild things": lions and tigers and bears while the other girls were doing the butterflies and flowers etc. It was a brief career. I would trade a few special order pieces for my own very tiny stack of ivory but could not in good conscience even work them.

For years I tried to do something else. 

Mastodon was the next best option.  For years other artists made knife handles and other type projects from mastodon, walrus tusk (live or petrified) and many other media, but none handled the same and I was too guilt ridden at this point... so I gave up.

Every few years I tried again.  It was on a trip to see my Mother in her senior campground, that she showed me her gourd art! At first she would collect pine needles to weave baskets (rather cliché but....) but now she was adding to the gourd as a perch for her basketry. 

The gourd was cut or chipped or broken.  She used the flat round pieces, pierced, as a base for the baskets.  She cut them in half and wove the top part as basketry.  

She did some beautiful stuff.

I asked one day, what she did with the left overs.  "Toss them, I guess."

I am a very amateur archeologist and I am in love with pottery shards.  I saw a way to do my scrimshaw ... or approximate it, on a very vegan friendly way and wanted the random shapes, like shards, to be my palette.  

So I began my experiments.