Bugling Bull Elk

Seems like I didn't get to do much in the way of leather carving this summer (I'm not sure that's true, but it feels that way). A couple weekends ago I thought about carving myself a new belt, had a strap cut out, cased it, put it in a bag to let the moisture do it's thing, and then um...... I forgot about it for several days. When I finally remembered it and picked up the bag, I had grown some of the funkiest mold ever. I should have taken a picture before I tossed the belt and the bag.

Last weekend I decided to try again, but not with a belt. I don't know what got into me the time before, I HATE making belts. This time I decided to try and carve a picture (big surprise there). Earlier this summer we had stopped in Missoula MT on our way home from family vacation and visited the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation visitor center. They have some really cool displays there and I picked up a couple new wildlife books. One is called Rocky Mountain Elk Portofolio, Photography of Donald M. Jones. This guys books are full of great pictures of wildlife in Montana. For a while now I've been wanting to try my hand at carving a bugling elk and this book had a great close up picture of just that.

This project was fairly quick to do. I traced the outline of the elk from the picture and then attempted to recreate all the fine details onto leather. The International Federation of Leather Guilds' annual show is coming up quickly and one of the catagories in the show is for flat uncolored pictures. I decided that I would use this as an entry in that catagory. This elk was just begging me to emboss him and it took all I had to keep myself from doing it. Here's how my first bugling elk turned out.