Hope you enjoyed the first look at the creation of my Scraptrich. If you're interests is still piqued, continue on!
Now that the body is completed, it's time to move on to the construction of the head, wings and feathers.
Now, here is where I delved in to a bit of research. I was an avid Discovery Channel watcher when I was a kid, so I'm familiar with a LOT of different animals, how the look, how they're shaped, and for the most part I can build them just off memory. But usually with a specific request, I'll go back and familiarize myself with the animal in particular, make sure I'm getting the designs right.
And this is where Google Image Search comes in!
This is literally how I 'research' just about everything I craft. I do an Image Search, then peruse the result and re-familiarize myself with my subject. Since what I'm crafting is sculpture and not meant to be realistic, I'm not worried about all the nitty-gritty details of my subject. I just need to know the basic overall look.
I checked a few things... like making sure Ostrich have 2 toes instead of 3 (though even if they had 3, I wasn't going to go chopping up the feet for 1 extra toe at this point), I looked at their feathers, at the shape of their heads, their beaks, their eyes, how their bodies looked.
Once I had an idea of what I was going to do, it was off to the shop!
Well.... ok, maybe not RIGHT off to the shop.... after all, now that I had the body done, it was time to round up the supplies I would need to craft the face. Which meant I needed a pair of eye balls.
Now, making eyes isn't really that hard. There's a lot of ways you can do it in a sculpture. The issue with this particular piece though.... was that I wanted eyes that would stand out. I didn't want eyes that would rust. Or that were a color that would 'blend in' with the dark silvers of the metal, or the dusky reds of rust. I wanted eyes that would be noticeable, irregardless of what color the steel was. Eyes that wouldn't fade, would discolor, wouldn't chip or flake.
I wanted marbles. Big blue or green marble eyes. Marbles are made of glass, and glass does not fade, does not chip or flake, does not rust, and the reflective properties of glass tend to give sculptures a liveliness that's hard to achive with just metal parts.
And they had to be big, because this is a large ostrich and ostrich have big eyes.
Now this is where things got to be a bit difficult... because I wanted a pair of eyes that were roughly
1 1/4in - 1 1/2in in diameter. They needed to be large so that I could recess them into sockets and mold the metal around them to hold them in place, yet still have them be noticeably visible. Unfortunately, marbles don't normally come in those sizes, if you can even FIND marbles anymore.
I checked online first, hoping to score a good deal. But none of the marble sellers had anything in that size, and the few large marbles I did find were either the wrong colors, were too decorative, or too expensive.
So with that idea foiled, I spent most of a Saturday afternoon driving all over the city trying to find a pair of glass balls. Found plenty of crystal balls of assorted colors. Some stone balls. But they were all quite expensive (I was not going to pay $40-$100 for a pair of eye balls). I finally managed to track down a pair of green 'gem cut' glass decorations at a rock shop. Wasn't quite what I was looking for, but they fit the size range I needed, so I decided to roll with it.
With the head done it was time to attach it to the body.
I wish I had gotten pictures of this next part.... because here is where I start adding feathers and wings and stuff. Buuuut... I forgot to bring my camera. So you guys will have to settle for some rough sketches and fill-in pictures.
In case anyone was wondering... I didn't use patterns for this sculpture. Other then the beak, everything was created free-form. I just find it easier to free-form designs a lot of the time. Unless I need to have a specific look, thus requiring me to take the time to actually make a paper pattern, I just build my large sculptures on the fly.
That's also how I usually how I make feathers. Most feathers don't NEED to have a specific look to them, they just need to have the right general shape so you know what they are. And it's just way too time consuming to draw out individual paper patterns for half a dozen different feathers of assorted sizes and shapes.
As I said, I forgot to take pics of this part of the process. But I drew a quick sketch to show how I draw the feathers on the metal. Since ostrich have large, fluffy, rounded feathers, I drew a lot of big, curved, rounded coma's, squeezing in as many as I could close together. The dashes are to indicate where to cut so it creates a much more feathery look then if I'd left all the pieces solid.
I don't have a picture of the finished feathers either, but you can see how they turned out here.
Since ostrich are raggedy looking birds, I fiddled with the feathering around the edges, bending them in different directions to give them a fluffier, more organic look.
With the feathers ready to go, I built the tail and then the wings. Since the wings needed to have more structure and stability then tail feathers (which were just welded onto the body), I used rebar for the wing frame, welding it in place just in front of the legs so that the rebar frame would all be connected.
If you've ever gone and looked at an ostrich, they have odd shaped wings. They're not quite like other birds that flex out like arms, they're more like an oval paddle with fluffy feathers (or at least that's how the look when the ostrich has them spread). So rather then making a V shape, I curved them like a bow, arching gently away from to the body in a relaxed pose. This way you could see the wings, but they weren't way spread out, which would've made the sculpture even more front heavy..
Here's some sketches of roughly how the wings were built.
Scrap was added around the base of the wings to help not only 'fluffy-up' the outline of the wing, but it also filled in the gap between the wing and the body, making the wings look as if they were part of the whole, rather then separate limbs sticking out the sides.
Again, I wish I'd thought to grab my camera and take pics, because at this point, I thought I was done. The head was built, the wings and tail were built and expertly fluffed. The body was modified to give just a hint of raggedyness. Everything was good.
Uuuuntil I took it home... and discovered one of the welds on the face had broken. And since the face is connected to the head/cranium by only a few welds, it had to be fixed. I was also told by a certain someone.... *coughmomcough*... that it's eyes were weird and made it look angry.
Upon further examination, I decided that yes, the eyes did make it look weird and bug-like. I also decided I didn't really like the way the head looked.
It's so much easier to notice flaws in a design once you have a chance to take it home, get out of the work environment, and just LOOK at it. Unfortunately, it was rather late at night and I had work the next day, so repairs would have to wait.
So, the following week, it was back to the shop!
To Be Continued....
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