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Old 09-29-2008, 03:36 PM
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KatherinePlumer KatherinePlumer is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Oak Run, California
Posts: 233
Default Katherine's Scrimshaw Tutorial: experimenting with mammoth ivory

(If you would like to comment on this submission, you may do so by posting a reply in this thread. Thanks! Kaitlin)


Howdy all! Time to once again entertain you with my random ramblings and adventures in scrimshaw. Photos of the bear cub scrim have been sent off with my application for a wildlife art museum show. I won't know the results til March... :fingerscrossed:

A couple weeks ago at an art show I ran into someone who used to do scrim 20+ years ago. He asked me if I'd ever worked on mammoth or mastodon ivory, and told me that "anything you scrim will instantly look old." Cool. He also warned me that it's very very soft and I may need to seal the surface. Oh boy. Coincidentally, I had just bought two tiny slabs of mammoth ivory:



So in my quest to explore all scrimmable surfaces, I am now going to try mammoth ivory. The little card I got with this stuff says most of it's about 15,000 years old. That boggles my mind.

This being my first time working with this stuff, I consider this fairly experimental. Chances are a lot of people reading this have vastly more experience with it than I do, but I'm going to see what I can do, figure out what type of ink will be best, how to prep the surface, etc. I do have an image (or at least a subject) in mind for a final image.

I will be starting with the piece pictured on the right, it has more cracks in it, so I'm more willing to sacrifice that one if I mess up, but hopefully I won't do that. These are both pretty rough, so the first step is to sand them down "glassy smooth." This is the worst part for me, I'm terrible at this!

Goal of this project: figure out how well I like mammoth ivory, experiment with different techniques and figure out the best way to handle the material, and hopefully in the end come up with a good scrimshaw!