30: Vulturoo

It all started with this guy. In Mr. Kovach's illustration methods class, we were to design a narrative sculpture, creating a character or scene and a schematic to accompany it. Admittedly, I was rather frazzled at the time it was assigned, so I chose two guide words for myself and went with it: Kangaroo vulture.


Since it had to be narrative, I decided to give the newly dubbed Vulturoo some prey, which was initially a rabbit, and evolved into a sort of springhare-sparrow to fit the mammal-bird theme.With the final schematic on display, I set about making a wire and foil armature, sculpting directly onto it with Super Sculpey and gluing it to a wooden board for support. I didn't get any photos of the sculpting process, unfortunately, but here's a few of the final sculpt and the primed sculpt:
good movies

And here we are all finished up! It was painted with acrylic paints accompanied by loads of matte fixative, a dash of pastel, a small portion of nail polish, and some moss I found at Michaels. The vulturoo's coloration was based on a king vulture and a tree kangaroo while the springhare-sparrow was based on a white-throated sparrow.


This was my first real attempt at full-blown sculpture, so it was very much a learning process. Things could have gone a lot worse, especially considering I had no idea what I was doing with the wire armature supports, so I'm thankful the entire thing didn't break under its own weight!

Vulturoo wouldn't be smiling anymore!