Long-legged beastie

Picture from the internet. Coloured by me

A goat leg consists of four main bones. There's the thigh, between hip and knee, and the shin which is a single bone down from the knee. In humans there are two bones here (tibia and fibula), but in goats they're fused into one. At the distal end of the shin bone is the hock, which is equivalent to a human ankle and there's even the calcaneus which is the same as a heel bone.

From the hock to the fetlock (at least, that's what it's called in horses) is the cannon bone, and here is the hinge where the bones split into two that together make up the pastern that terminates at the hoof.

Enough about the biological terminology; how does all this affect a faun costume?

Well, it's all to do with getting the proportions to look right.

Over at Łazienki Park in Warsaw, there are at least two faun statues. They're both holding gas lamps in an echo of the Chronicles of Narnia. I have yet to find out who sculpted them or when, but one of the statues is pictured above. I couldn't resist colourising the image.

Hoof-length proportions

I took a long look at the proportions in the statue, and other statues of fauns and satyrs that I've encountered on my travels around the internet and in real life. The leg-bone proportions all seem to follow the basic pattern wherein the pastern is one hoof length and the cannon is two hoof lengths.

This is somewhat different from examples of normal Capra aegaerus hircus, whose hooves are a lot smaller in proportion to the leg length, but these don't habitually balance on their hind legs.

I did some more research, comparing what my own costume achieves with what I think could be achieved by modifying the hoof design, everybody's favourite faun Mr Tumnus, and a domestic goat that I photographed locally.

Domestic goat,      Mr Tumnus,      Modified costume,      Original costume

I superimposed a thin red line around the goat hind leg and copied it over on to Messrs Tumnus and Furvus. The green lines represent basic bone lengths, and the yellow lines show the differences in heights from the ground to the pastern joint, hock, knee, and the lowest human part of a faun.

As a proportion of hoof length:-

                        Pastern    Cannon    Shin
Domestic Goat           0.8        2.7       3.2
Mr Tumnus               0.7        2.0       2.2
Mr Furvus (modified)    0.7        1.6       2.0
Mr Furvus (as-built)    1.3        1.9       2.1
Łazienki Faun           1.0        2.0       2.0

I appear to have this shin and cannon about right, but, as I suspected from previous pictures, the pastern is really too long in my as-built costume. Shortening it would require building the hoof around my foot rather than forming it as a platform, but that creates difficulties in building a realistic cleavage.

Consider Hooves MkIII a work-in-progress, with Mk II being workable for now.