Turning a blind eye...

This was a project I recently completed. When the customer brought it in the buck had recently lost his right eye in a fight, it was flat and oozing. The customer asked if I could reproduce it somehow. Having never done one before I told him "Sure... No problem!" and he thought it would be cool if I would mount it in an aggressive pose with its tongue licking its nostrils like its heading into a fight. Again I said "Yeah, thats doable". Well this is the final result and I was wondering what you all thought. Keep in mind this is not a competition piece, this is a customer mount. I had to sew a patch in behind the right eye because there was a slip about the size of a 50 cent piece from infection. I did not cut the entire lower jaw off an lower it to be 100% anatomically correct. I just built the whole thing up with apoxie sculpt to add depth from the bottom of the jaw to lipline. Also not sure if a whitetail would be able to stick its tongue out the right side of its mouth and still have the lips closed on the left side. Probably not, but I was not willing to invest a ton of time on it like I would if it were for competition. I made the tongue and eye from scratch. Well I guess I started with a factory eye and painted and clear coated it for effect. I also made the aperature for the right eye smaller as if he was squinting a bit. I had a horse that had Moon Blindness and his affected eye was always a bit more squinty. I tried grooming the hair back to look more aggresive but he was transitioning into his winter coat and that looked terrible. The hair was all different lengths. Other than that I pretty much winged it. So fire away.

 

Thanks for all the compliments guys! For those who were asking about how I did the eye it was pretty easy. I just grabbed on eye out of my supply that didnt have a mate. I honestly think it was a 32 mm elk eye that I dropped the other years ago and shattered it. I tried a couple different paint blends till I found the one I liked most. I use wildlife colors and it was mostly basic white with a several drops of sky blue mixed in. I painted it with a velocity jet at about 35psi to get a good fine mist with no splatter. It was two coats of paint, then a flash coat of fish gloss followed by a heavy coat of fish gloss. Pretty easy.