Assemblage Sculpture

This is a sculpture I made of a broad billed hummingbird for a group project to create a flock of different birds. I used the Maine Audubon website for a photo reference and used newspaper, paint color samples, wire, and hot glue for materials.

To make this sculpture I first crumpled the newspaper and held it together with masking tape to made the body and head of the bird. I than cut out wings and used small pieces of paint sample paper to cover all six wings, making them brown and green. At this point I hot glued wire to the wings and stuck them into the body, sealing the seams with hot glue. Next I cut out small triangles of brown, green, and blue paint sample paper and glued them to the body and used larger ones to make the tail. Lastly I made the long thin beak out of a piece of wire that I wrapped in red duct tape.

I chose to make a hummingbird because I liked the idea I had to make six wings instead of two. I did this to represent the blur and illusion of many wings when that is seen when hummingbirds flap them at over 50 times per second. This piece relates to my life because I often see these humming birds when I visit my grandparents in the summer. This piece could be stronger if I had covered the wire glued to the bottoms of the wing with paper "feathers" to make the sculpture more neat and obviously realistic. It could also be better if I had made the individual "feathers" smaller as hummingbird's feathers are very fine. However this would have taken much more time and glueing them on would have been unnecessarily difficult.