Assemblage Sculpture

The point of this project was to create a bird sculpture using different objects. It was an assembly assignment, so using reference images and choosing a bird and observing their body and anatomy, I re-created it. When creating my bird, I wanted to stick with a main theme, instead of random materials that would fit my bird. I chose a griffon vulture for my bird, because vultures have always been interesting yet scary creatures to me,and griffon vultures a just generally more attractive than regular vultures.

To begin my bird, I started with an armature of the basic shape of the vulture. It started with the body, then I attacked basic shapes for the head, neck, legs, and small pieces of cardboard for the wings. Vultures are fairly large with huge wings, so to create the most realistic wings I could, I made small beginners to attach large pieces of paper shaped as feathers to them. I then added another layers of feathers, the next step was to cover the whole body in little feathers, which took a very very long time to do and was pretty much excrutiating. Then, I created the beak and talons and using construction paper I ripped up little pieces to cover them, creating a rough look to my vulture. Then I covered he legs and neck and head with more little feathers.

My inspiration from this project was mostly based upon the colors. Originally I found a color palette that I was in love with, but I realized it wouldn't really represent the vulture image that I wanted. So, I went for more brown and tan colors and found that that was an easy palette to fill and ultimately brought together the whole look of the vulture, especially when I used the white for the head and the neck. I already explained why I wanted to do a griffon vulture, but I just found them very pleasing to the eye. They have huge wings and intimating looks, and I guess I chose that bird because it's really different then what I normally do. At first, I wanted to do a penguin, but then I realized that that was so ANNA LABBE to do. It would've been very typical and normal for me to do a small, cute bird. But I wanted a challenge, I wanted something different, something with an impact, so I chose to create a large griffon vulture.