The Unicorn Taxidermy.

It's absolutely no secret that I love unicorns. I love them as much as if they were real animals. I mean who's to say they never were, right? There's parts of the ocean that we haven't discovered, even with all the technology we have, so I can believe that there once were unicorns on this planet that educated people once thought was flat and that dragons and turtles and hell itself was keeping it afloat in space. Unicorns were mentioned in the bible, you know. Maybe there are unicorns at the bottom of the ocean...mermaids riding sea-unicorns. I'd like to believe that.

There is no question that I'd like to show my eternal adoration for this majestic creature...by having its head on my wall. A little morbid and odd, I know. I looked up unicorn taxidermies (faux of course, I would never intentionally hurt the poor dears) and they're pretty pricey. It's justifiable, I mean who wouldn't want one? But, because I'm poor and creative, I decided to make a taxidermy of my own. 

I googled "how to make a unicorn taxidermy" and got some pretty strange results but one seemed pretty easy to follow along. A lady was creating a unicorn for her daughter's bedroom and it definitely gave me some ideas about how to go about making my own. I wasn't incredibly thrilled about the way hers came out so I decided to forge my own path from her. 

So far I have used 

• a laser cut board
• styrofoam and smooth-foam
•  toothpicks
• newspaper
• flour and water (papier-mache "glue")
• tacky glue
• Martha Stewart stucco effect finish
• Martha Stewart sparkle effect finish
• flat white spray paint.

I sketched out what I envisioned for the unicorn to look like and started my process. Using the foam and toothpicks, I created some kind of skeleton for what would become the unicorn's head, horn, neck, and upper torso. I found that it was hard to get the toothpicks into the foam on both ends without pushing too hard and sending the toothpick shooting through the foam or snapping the toothpick altogether. Somehow I managed to balance it out and keep it together with a little tacky glue and a lot of prayer. Liken this process to making a house of cards on top of a basketball.

I secured the "torso" part of the unicorn to the board with the tacky glue. The board was a little warped so this took some work because the semi-circle wouldn't lay quite flat enough and the weight above it made the whole "house of cards" want to tilt over. Once the tacky glue began to set, this became only slightly easier but I did find myself continually going over the the sections with more glue just to make sure it was secure. Knowing what I know now, I'd probably use a stickier glue or something that sets faster. 

Transporting the thing to class was difficult because it was so fragile but once I got it there, I immediately began to reinforce the joints and gaps with newspaper and papier-mache glue. For this thing to be able to hang on a wall it would need more strength. Also, I shaped the foam so that the edges would be more organic and blend better with the rest of the piece, specifically the unicorn horn. 

From there, I began work on the body of the unicorn with strips of newspaper. That part wasn't so hard at all, however I found out that the smooth foam is not porous enough to hold the papier-mache. It kept slipping off of the foam like wet noodles! I ended up slathering the smooth-foam sections in tacky glue and attaching the papier-mache strips like that. After there was a layer of paper on there, I had no problems finishing in the traditional papier-mache style. I only really used smooth-foam because it was lighter and would hold-up better as an extremity (i.e. the horn & the muzzle). 

I didn't do too many layers of newspaper because I didn't want the head to become saturated and heavy and break apart from the board when hung but I did use newspaper to create definition in the nostrils and the eye sockets. To create the texture of the horn, I used paper towels. I felt that they would remain more puffy when saturated instead of crinkly and flat like the newspaper. I think its an interesting bony looking structure.

I used a toilet tissue roll to create the ears. 

I put on the stucco finish and sparkle finish on the laser-board to create visual interest. After it dried, it kind of lost some of it's texture, so I may re-do it again later. 

Just recently I have started spraying the entire piece flat white. So far I have gone thorugh two cans of spray paint and I have two more at hand. I feel that I will I will need all of them...maybe it's the quality of the paint? I was going to spray the horn gold but alas, EVERY SINGLE CAN of gold metallic spray paint was gone. Its fantastic how my luck seems to work. I grabbed a can of silver paint and will spray the horn as the last step in the speed-painting adventure. (I'm still looking for some gold graffiti somewhere in my neighborhood to justify my sacrifice.)

Right now my main concern is that the spray paint is making the imperfections in the smoothness of the unicorn extremely obvious. I have to find a way to work that out.