Arctic Sippy Birds

Sandhill Crane.  

They remind me of those little plastic sippy birds

They are just missing the top hats.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Baleen Plates

This is a section of baleen plates from a beached humpback whale.  These plates are about 2 feet long, but on some species of whales they can grow 5 or 6 times that length.

I pull off one plate at a time as I need them for reproductions.

Photo Credit: Tim Rast

Arctic Fox Digging for Lemmings

Fox Skull

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

We Are... Archaeologists

About a year ago I was contacted by someone assembling a marketing campaign to promote careers with the Newfoundland and Labrador Government.  They asked to use a photo of some of my harpoon reproductions to help illustrate a career in Archaeology.  The campaign is now online, you can check it out here:

We Are Archaeologists (Web Page).

We Are (Online Book)

We Are (Video).

Photo Credit: Screen grab from http://www.gov.nl.ca/WeAre/archaeologist.html#

Photo Patterns

When I start new job the first thing I do is gather as many reference photos as I can.  Ideally I take the photos myself, but sometimes I work from published or unpublished photos taken by the archaeologists who found the artifacts.  I then print them out at 1:1 scale and use them as patterns.  A lot of those photos also wind up on this blog.

Photo Credit: Tim Rast

Soapstone Polar Bears

I made all these little soapstone bears for The Rooms.  They are included in education kits sent to classrooms around the Province.

This is the original artifact that they are all based on.  Its  a Dorset Palaeoeskimo artifact  from northern Labrador. You can see it on display in the Connections Gallery in The Rooms in St. John's.

The 20 little bears were just the right size to be delivered in an egg carton.

All of the soapstone that I used for the bears came from highway roadcuts on Newfoundland's Baie Verte Peninsula.

Did they all catch the sent of something? I would not want to be downwind of this many curious bears.

I don't think I realized it when I carved them, but with his nose lifted and his mouth open, the posture of the little Dorset bear looks like a bear sniffing the air.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Recent Indian Reproductions

I found these pictures on my hard drive from 2006.  They are a Recent Indian knife and scraper reproduction.  I can't recall who the client was, but I think it was either The Rooms or the Province.

In both tools, the stone blade is held in the wood handle with hide glue and rawhide.  Each piece is covered in Red Ochre.

The scraper is a thin, flake scraper and the style of the handle is loosely based on northern scrapers.  To the best of my knowledge there has never been a Recent Indian scraper handle found for a stone endscraper in an archaeological site in Newfoundland.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast