I saw the first accumulation of snow on Monday. Although it has burned off, another round is expected on Friday. The temperatures look to be nosediving into the proper conditions for snow to arrive and stay, so I will need to make the decision to call the season in the next few days. That just means putting away the field packs and firing up the prep tools, the drawing tools, the next fossil season planning tools. For now, some prep work I performed in the last week. These are not absolutely complete or done, but the bulk of the work is complete. 1. Pliomera fischeri: Initial state. This one is glued in a few spots Halfway mark. Here we can even see the hypostome underneath. This one has got some stickiness with plenty of marine debris vomit. Final stage: Mostly done, but still have some fussy spots to clean up and out. 2. Asaphus expansus robustus. Initial state. This one is missing a pleura, but likely healing damage. Measures about 6 cm. Halfway mark. This is mostly scribe work as abrasion leeches the colour and removes delicate microsculpture. Sadly, there are pitted areas that cannot really be fixed, as those are just the artifacts of preservation. Abrading those areas would only result in making holes and cracks bigger. No matter how careful one can be, mishaps occur. In this case, a piece of the glabella came off with a sticky piece of matrix. I have kept the piece, but it may actually be easier to do a resto. Final stage. Still some fussy gunk to deal with, but the bulk of the work is done. I am just waiting on a shipment of Milliput and acrylic paints to do the resto of the glabellar area. The photos are a bit harsh for both this and the above specimen, and look much better in person. This time around, I spent the time to landscape this in a different way. I began by planing the surface to the bottom edge of the trilobite with the scribe and very light touches of the Dremel diamond wheel, after which point I stippled the entire surface with the scribe tip, lending this the appearance of the trilobite resting on a sandy surface. I also used the diamond wheel to cut the bloc so that it could stand at different orientations. Ok, so not A+ work, which is fine given that I do have some tool limitations at the moment, but certainly a learning experience. I do feel my confidence in working with matrix is improving, giving me a sense of having control over the planning and execution of how the piece should look for presentation as opposed to passively accepting however the matrix might turn out.
And that's it for now! Comments are closed.
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Kane Faucher
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February 2024
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