guy brings in a deer head that he had in his freezer and the nose lips and ears were freezer burnt. but i knew it would rehydrate in the pickle. anyways i tanned it and it came out just fine, except for 2-3 small spots about the size of a pencil eraser on the outside edge of the nostrils, that still had the freezer-burnt look to them. the spots sorta look like a brown scab and there was no slippage, but you could see where there was a couple short nose hairs missing on these spots. so i call the guy up and tell him, he says he understands and asks if i can repair it. i say i dont know if i can, and that i can try but there's no guarantee it will look good. i thought about airbrushing over it, but it would still be noticeable, i was also thinking about cutting it out but it is on the short hair near the nose pad outside the nostrils and i dont think that i would be able to make that work either. he's got no problem with shooting another deer and getting another cape, its just that i want to do as good as job i can for the guy. can this be repaired or does anybody know what im talking about? thanks for your help.
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Cut out the old one, and use a repro nose, blend and feather and you will be fine
because this one spot im concernced about is just above the lip on the outside edge of the nose pad just under where the nostril starts. i think the only way to get rid of it would be to cut it out then sorta feather the stitch line into the nose pad w/ apoxie. but im not sure that it would work
mk, What you describe sounds to me more like small injury. I can see that the cape suffered freezer burn over perhaps a good bit of the face. Now, IF the deer had some small injurys prior to death these little spots of injury would freezer burn as did the nose pad. When you rehydrated and pickled the freezer burn did indeed become corrected and the injured areas did as well but still look different because they always did look different. I think there would be no problem in this area that would prevent the freezer burn from rehydrating-it's thin skin. What you have ,I think, is just a deer with natural blemishes. I would mount it up, let dry completely and then evaluate the situation. Probably by stacking this skin on the form loosly and pushing the skin toward the injuries all around the blemish, once dry should hardly be noticed. At least that's how it looks to me from here. Enjoy, Aaron H.
i dont think it was from an injury, maybe from a being rubbed like a rug burn. the spots still looked the same after pickle/tanning, there was no problem rehydrating the cape or these spots. i just dont know if it would be repairable, or look good after i repaired it. the ones around the nostril im not too worried about because i could tuck that into the nostril then paint would beable to cover those up. the one spot im worrried about that i talked about in my second post is a spot the size of a dime/ slightly smaller.
The brown short hair on the edge of the nose by the pad painted brown with a thick paint and do it it on the other side also so it looks even ,if is on the white hairs do the same.
I get deer like that all the time in florida, those are small injuries they get from eating in the shrubs.
Your customer should understand there is no perfection in nature and wild animals will get injuries.