Current location:	Morningstar Hall
Current mood:	sleepy
Entry tags:	art, bones

On Bones
I went ahead and ordered the hyena skull.

I had nightmares last night that it arrived much smaller than advertised, and that it fell apart when I touched it. Great. Just great.

Regarding my other skulls, I had a streak of inspiration, and I'm currently in the market for more bones/skulls for art projects; foxes and coyotes, bobcats, badgers, cats, dogs, that sort of thing. Small carnivores, mostly. And I am getting frustrated. I can go onto eBay and find a dozen beautiful specimens of just about any kind of game skull you care to name, and inevitably when I ask how they were prepared, I discover they were prepared by boiling.

There are only three methods that yield strong, clean skulls.

Maceration is the slow, revolting process of taking a skull, stripping most of the meat from it, then submerging it in a bucket. You change out the stinky water regularly, but not too regularly. Bacterial action cleans the flesh from the skull. This is a slow, smelly process.

Your second choice is to feed the bones to a colony of dermestid beetles. Because they don't eat rotten flesh, you still have to strip most of the meat off the bones yourself, a nasty task. Not to mention that dermestid colonies are time-consuming, expensive, and take up a lot of space. Still, if you are preparing lots of bones on a regular basis, dermestids are your best bet.

The third way is the most "natural." You bury the bones in an open-topped box after stripping off most of the meat, and you plant veggies over them. By the time your lettuce or what-have-you is ready to harvest, you have bones free of meat. Professional critter-parts dealers don't use this method, though.

The trouble is that most skulls you buy on eBay are prepared by boiling. This will often split the teeth in hairline fractures that can widen over time. It also causes the fat to permeate the bone itself, and though the bone can be whitened safely with peroxide, the oil will eventually come to the surface. It makes them smell like a leather shop and it gives them a lovely yellowish old-bone patina, but I am not sure how stable that surface is. I do not know if the fats in boiled bones will cause problems over the long-term with whatever I decide to do to the bones. Will it affect paint adhesion? I've posted to a dead things crafter's community about this, but I don't know if I'll get many helpful answers. Plus, cracked teeth really bum me out.

If you want white bones, you have to whiten them with something. The best way to do this is to dip it in hydrogen peroxide. Sometimes, though, people bleach skulls with . . . well . . . with bleach. Bleach will cause the bone itself to break down. I've found it also takes away the lovely natural slickness of bone, turning it into something more like new chalk. A very subtle change in texture, but not one I like. Too much bleach will cause bone to eventually pit, scale, and flake, turning it to so much crumbly meal. Even a lightly-bleached skull is more fragile than an unbleached skull.

So I'm in a bind.

I can get peroxide-bleached, boiled specimens of foxes, coyotes, badgers, skunks, wolverines, etc., from eBay. Small game can run from $15 to $30, and some species are far more expensive. While most appear to be perfectly attractive in auction photos, eBay is eBay and boiling is boiling, and they still may come greasy, or with missing teeth, or chipped or cracked teeth which may have been epoxied in place (which means I'll have to scrape it all away before I can paint it). Also, these are random people, who may or may not have come by their bones legally.

If I want perfect specimens that I know were properly prepared and ethically obtained, I can go to one of the sources I trust and pay two to four times as much.

That's a significant difference in price, and that difference is going to affect the final product's price accordingly. The difference in something like fox skulls is only a matter of $30 or so. But a wolf? A skull like that might run $100 on eBay, but will cost at least $250 from a reputable source.

Another thing that affects price is quality. Depending on species, there is a price gap of as much as $50 between A quality (all teeth, only natural imperfections) and B quality (chipped or missing teeth, fractures, other minor damage) skulls.

Now, I prefer perfect specimens with all their teeth, but frankly I don't know if the average collector of weird art cares that much. Would they be willing to pay $15 - $50 more for a specimen with all its teeth, or would they consider a few missing teeth to add character and an air of arcane mystery? Would they be willing to pay nearly twice as much for a properly-cleaned skull, even if the two initially looked identical? Where do I draw that line?

It's a quality of materials issue. If the difference were one of $5 or $10, I wouldn't care. Even $20 I could find a way to absorb or distribute. But $50 or more? Ouch!

All that said, I am working on my first small project, just to experiment. It's a fox skull I got cheap, and I'm using black ink on it. It's missing some teeth, but not any of the important ones, and I'm having such fun I can hardly believe it. There is something immensely pleasurable about handling bones, especially skulls. Their unique sheen, their mingled delicacy and strength, their strange mix of lightness and weight . . . so beautiful.

I get weird around bones. They creep some people out, especially skulls, and I know this, but I just adore them. I like to cradle them, touch them, smell them. I whisper to them, and then I hold them close and I listen. Sometimes I press the smooth ones to my mouth, my lips, because my fingers are not sensitive enough to detect their grain. I use my nails to find the subtle changes in texture where pebbled turns to smooth, I feel out the sutures and seams. I tap on them, scratch at them, I hold the smaller ones to the light, showing me the thickness and thinness in weird patterns of light and shadow. I peer through the openings into the braincase, I blow into the webbing of turbinate bones that fill the nose. I love teeth, but the zygomatic arch, where the bones of the eyesocket curve out and meet one another, is one of nature's most perfect pieces of architecture. The two little bones that make up the top of the nose are wonderful, too.

It's crazy behavior, I know, but that's the beast in me. Some part of me is always gnawing on bones in the dark.