JUNE 10, 2016

In this project, our goal was to make an assemblage sculpture of a bird, using essentially whichever materials we wanted to.

To start off, we had to pick a bird we wanted to do, and then we had to make an armature of it using newspaper and masking tape. This was basically the underlying body of the bird, without the feathers, etc. Once I had made the body with the newspaper and masking tape, I then added wife legs, cardboard wings, and cardboard feet. After this, it was time to cover it. I began by wrapping pink yarn around its body, keeping it in place using hot glue. Once that I was done, I did the wings—I used pink paint sample cards, cut them into feather shapes, and covered the cardboard wings with them. In order to hide the writing on the back of these samples, I covered that side with some fabric that I found in a fabric sample book. I also used similar fabric to cover the cardboard feet, and to cover the beak, since I hadn't come up with a plan for that. Hot glue was used throughout this process, since I figured that it would provide the most trustworthy adherence.

I have a love-hate sort of relationship with this project. While the idea was nice, the time constraints were not—I get that we had four classes to work on it, but that's not quite enough time for a project of this size, especially with finals looming. However, I did like the process—especially since we got to pick our own materials for the most part. I liked the outcome of the yarn being used on my bird (should I have had more time, it could have perhaps been cleaner) and I also liked we were provided with so many paint sample cards, because I enjoyed using it for my wings. Working with the fabric was a bit more difficult, though—while it was easy to cut, it had weird tendrils that came from it that got everywhere, and also stuck to the yarn. In the end, however, I am decently satisfied with this project, although I wish I had had more time.