Jan Schoonover class on horns, hair and feathers

On Saturday June 6, I attended a class in Billings, MT with Jan Schoonover at Montana Leather Company. I've taken several classes from Jan in the past few years and he's taught me a lot about the art of extreme embossing leather. This class was kind of a refresher for me. It focused on creating different textures on leather to simulate hair, feathers, horns and antlers. In the past, I've taken classes on carving a bighorn ram, antelope, quarter horse, indian portrait, arabian horse, bobcat, and a black bear.

Here Jan is demonstrating how to put texture on a whitetail deer antler with a modeling tool. We also learned how to carve and texture a bighorn ram horn, a mountain goat horn, and antelope horn along with several different lengths of hair and some feathers.

There were 10 students in this class from Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota. Many of the students have taken one or more classes from Jan before, for others it was their first class. Jan teaches classes on carving many different animals from pets to wildlife and has taught in several different states. Jan's next class will probably be held in late July or early August and it sounds like the subject might be a mountain lion.

Below are pictures of the different horns, antlers and feathers that we learned to carve in this class.