It’s reveal day for the ‘birds of prey’ theme challenge hosted by the Art Elements design team. This month’s theme was chosen by Cathy Spivey Mendola. The challenge is to make art, in any media, inspired by this theme. There are 446 species of birds of prey, also known as raptors (from the Latin “rapere,” to seize or capture). The are divided into the Orders Falconiformes (the diurnal hunters such as hawks, falcons, eagles, and vultures) and Strigiformes (the nocturnally hunting owls). With 446 species to choose from, there’s no lack of inspiration in this theme.
This owl totem necklace was actually completed just before the theme for this month was announced. Maybe I am prescient? Probably not. If I were, I would have known to wait a few days to show it off on social media so I could pretend I made it for this theme. Even though it wasn’t made because of this theme, I am sharing it for the reveal. Because this is my blog and I make the rules.
When I think of birds of prey, I imagine what it takes to be an apex predator. Holding a spot at the top of a food chain requires specialized hunting and survival skills. For example, birds of prey have excellent vision and relatively large eyes. ‘The better to see you with,’ said the hungry bird to the little mouse. Of course, owls are the obvious place to start when you think about birds with large eyes. And owls are almost always popular choices for jewelry, art, and home decor. They are more or less trendy at any given time, but I can always find owl-themed items for sale. With owls being the obvious place to begin, I, of course, began with hawks.
I’ve seen a few tutorials where the sculpting begins with a flat outline to which dimension and details are added. That seemed a reasonable approach so I traced the outline of a flying hawk silhouette onto a sheet of clay and proceeded to add feathers and such.
The idea was to make a red-tailed hawk necklace focal. What I ended up with is a rather stylized version, with over emphasis on the wings and tail feathers. I’d like to say that was on purpose. I’d like to, but I cannot. It’s just the way it turned out as I went about making it.
Overall, I was rather happy with the way this piece was going, up until I added a wash of acrylic paint to bring out the details in the feathers and re-cured the piece to add a back. As you’ll see in the next photo, all the parts I intended to be buff got much darker.
While I was more or less okay with the proportions of the hawk being stylized, I was not happy with what happened to the coloring when I added a wash of paint and re-cured to attach the back. Normally, I would have added the clay to the back, re-cured, and then added the wash. I don’t know why I reversed the order. I do know that all the light parts darkened, and I blame the paint because I have left off-white pieces in the oven for longer and they didn’t darken like this. I tried bringing back the buff color in the feathers by removing some of the paint with isopropyl alcohol. Nothing came off. Because it was heat cured, I guess? I contemplated trying to re-paint the lighter bands on the feathers. That likely would have necessitated re-painting the darker parts too.
To turn the hawk into a necklace I made beaded links with sky stone (aka turquoise) and goldstone. I used the beaded links to connect the focal to antiqued copper chain. I had to redo one side of the necklace because I noticed when processing photos for this post that I had accidentally attached the beaded links in opposite orientations. You can see my mistake in the top photo. I wasn’t aiming for asymmetry and quickly fixed the problem before taking more photos.
While I briefly contemplated starting over and making a new hawk, I decided to let it be and move on to another idea I had for this theme: feathers. I may try to remake the hawk focal one day, but for this month, I went with hawk feathers for my next project. A few years ago I made a whole series of feather jewelry, including some snowy owl feathers that would fit this theme. I shared those owl feathers for the “shades of white” theme challenge, even though they weren’t made for it, because, again, my blog, my rules.
These are two of the red-tailed hawk feathers I made for this challenge. I made a total of five, and didn’t manage to turn these two into jewelry by the reveal date.
Despite what happened to the hawk focal, I went ahead with an acrylic wash on the feathers. I did not, however, re-cure them afterwards. They don’t have as much of the buff color in the design as the hawk, but I wasn’t taking the chance of ruining my desired effect. Antiquing a piece is always a leap of faith anyway. Sometimes it enhances the overall design. Sometimes it completely spoils your vision and there’s no going back.
These earrings use two of the five red-tailed hawk feathers that I made. I added beaded dangles with turquoise and brown goldstone on copper wire. They are almost as light as real feathers, but will last much longer. And no birds were harmed nor laws about collecting feathers violated to make these earrings.
Resisting my natural tendency to make ornate necklaces with lots of bells and whistles (aka beaded chain), I put this hawk feather on unadorned faux suede cording. I did, however, add a few beaded dangles to the pendant. I am a sucker for beady dangles. Oh, and there’s a bead at the end of the chain extender. That’s as much functional as decorative. It serves as a bit of counterweight to keep the clasp at the back of the necklace.
I was perhaps overly ambitious with my sculpting ideas for this month’s theme. I’m in the early stages of teaching myself to sculpt in polymer clay. For the most part, I have little idea what I’m doing, but I’m almost certain I’m doing it the hard way. Is there a good book on the easier way to use tools to make tiny details in clay? How can people with short stubby fingers use tools to make itty bitty bird feet, just as a completely random example?
If you follow me on Instagram (you do, don’t you?), you probably saw my WIP post about this owl face. Wherein I mentioned it was my first time using glass eyes. And how they made me feel as if my work was watching, and judging me.
Although not the first piece I worked on for this theme, a trinket box was my initial idea. I decided to put an owl face on the lid. I deliberated over what kind of owl for weeks before getting started. I spent zero time thinking about the rest of the box. As a result, the final composition lacks balance because after plopping the owl face dead center on the lid, I made the rest up on the fly.
This was intended to be a horned owl, but I think it ended up more of a fantasy owl-like bird based on my vague memory of images of horned owls. The leaves and berries were improvised background elements.
This is actually not an uncommon approach for me. I know I should sketch my designs before picking up the clay, so I can have a plan for the composition. The problem is, I am not great at sketching. Even the doodles I make when trying to keep awake in a meeting at my day job are pitiful. It’s as if there’s a disconnect between my mind’s eye and my hand. Perhaps I should have tried teaching myself to draw before teaching myself to sculpt? I think basic sketching should have been a required class for my undergrad biology degree. They expect you to draw things you see under a microscope and yet they schedule the art classes at the same time as the science labs. Sigh.
At first I thought I would texture the background of the box to look like a tree. As you can see, I made a good start at “wood grain” on the rim of the lid. And then I thought “that will be too much brown” if I do the whole box that way, so I added some twig and leaf texture to the base and the background of the lid and painted them green. It’s an ad lib forest scene of some kind.
By this time, I was still dissatisfied with the way my first piece turned out, and still half considering re-doing the hawk. Not just because of the darkened colors but also because of the proportions. I cut an outline in some clay, intending to re-make the hawk even though I’d told myself to move on. As I was adding the feathers, myself decided to turn this piece into a barn owl. As if to compensate for the loss of the lighter colors in the hawk feathers, the barn owl feathers have very little of the darker colors.
This is the owl before curing and adding the acrylic wash. The proportions turned out better than with the hawk. Perhaps I should consider doing what “they” recommend and make many repetitions of a thing until I can get them all to turn out the way I want? Pffft!
Although I think I did a better job with the proportions on the owl compared to the hawk, there’s still ample room for improvement. I don’t think I will ever be a realism artist who can recreate super realistic details, especially not at teeny tiny scales. I like realism, but I think creating it in art requires an attention to detail that exceeds my attention span or patience. Or knowledge of how to use tools.
Perhaps because I assembled this barn owl necklace in the same session as the red-tailed hawk necklace, it also uses beaded links with turquoise and goldstone. Or maybe that’s just the way it was meant to be all along. I’m not sure I love the antiquing on this one either. But it’s sealed now so we’ll just have to live with it.
I thought the barn owl necklace would be my final piece for this challenge because I was running out of days in the month. But then, we had a “snow day” in the middle of last week. We didn’t get much in the way of actual snow, but there was enough freezing rain in the forecast that my employer (among many others in the area, as well as the schools) decided to close the office because the roads would be treacherous. And so, I got an extra day to play with clay. Yay, snow!
I don’t know if there was an easier way to construct this, but the way I did it was to form the cactus and the owl separately, as seen here. Then I cut out part of the cactus for the nest, backfilled the hole with a base layer of “nest-colored” clay, and put the owl in the nest. You know, kind of the way an actual owl would end up nesting in an actual cactus.
The vessel I made during my snow day was an idea I had in the initial days after signing up for the challenge: a ferruginous pygmy owl nesting in a saguaro cactus. I pushed it aside because while I had a vision, I didn’t have anything resembling a plan for its execution. That’s actually true for most of my polymer clay sculpting, but in this case, the lack of plan included having no ideas for how to physically get started. However, the vision had several weeks to percolate in my subconscious while I worked on other ideas, such that when my bonus creative time happened, I did have the beginnings of an idea for how to implement it.
After putting the owl in the cactus nest, I added more detail to the cactus, including dotted lines in lieu of spines. I contemplated making wire spines, and then decided I probably didn’t want to get poked every time I came near my creation. Before curing, I used pastels to add shadows and highlights to the cactus. None of the details on the owl are painted; they were made by adding bits of colored clay to the base form.
I was still basically making it up as I went, but I think I had beginner’s luck on my side because it turned out much better than I expected. It’s not 100% true to my vision. It’s maybe 50% there. My vision was that it look like an actual pygmy owl nesting in an actual saguaro cactus, but in miniature scale. However, as mentioned previously, I don’t think realism is in me as an artist, even as I tend toward being a realist philosophically. I’m such an enigma.
This is the finished cactus owl vessel. It turned out more whimsical than my vision. That seems to happen to me a lot, even though I don’t consider myself whimsical by nature. Regardless, I am pleased with it as a first attempt because it’s clearly an owl in a cactus. It joins a tidepool-themed vessel (made for another Art Elements challenge) in my workspace, where it holds some of my most frequently used sculpting tools.
That’s all for me on this theme, although I reserve the right to make more owls, or hawks, at a time of my choosing. This design challenge is also a blog hop and I encourage you to visit the other participating artists to see more birds of prey interpreted and rendered in a variety of styles and media.
I think the cactus is more realistic than the owl. If I were to do this over, I think I would sculpt the owl in white clay and paint the details similar to how the cactus was made. Or maybe the owl just needs a wash of acrylic paint to bring it to life? Bahahaha!
Guests
Tammy <–You are here!
Beth
Cat
Anita
Kathy
Alysen
Linda
Rozantia
Jennifer
Hope
Sarajo
Melissa
Sarah
Team Members
Caroline
Cathy
Claire
Jen
Jenny
Karen
Laney
Lesley
Lindsay
Marsha
Niky
Sue
I’m always blown away how you manage to make more than one piece, all of them special and beautiful.
My favorite is the owl necklace, maybe this is in polymer clay what I had planned in wire, only you made it work out!
I love your owls. They look very realistic. I admire your patience!
Tammy, I made myself a cup of coffee before I sat down to read your blog… because knowing how delightful your commentary is when you share your design challenge…well, I just wanted to totally enjoy the start of my day:) And I have:) Your creativity just boggles my mind and I love hearing you describe what went right and what went wrong (though I never appreciate the wrongs – they all look right to me). Your sculpting is superb and your color choices to create that southwest look are really appealing to me. Bravo! Though it’s very snowy here, I want to say thanks for starting off my day with a smile and a breath of sunshine!
I can’t imagine what you mean about not being a realism artist…your pieces are more real than cartoonish. You always run away with these challenges. Your ideas are so plentiful and executed so beautifully! I’m not sure if I could pick a favorite of the bunch. I hate that you are not happy with the first one. If you hadn’t mentioned the flaws in it, I would not have known. He looks great to me. I am absolutely drawn to the owls though. Like I mentioned in my post, I have a thing for them. And, as you mentioned, they are always an obvious favorite in designs. But, I couldn’t help myself either. HA! Anyway, your contributions are beautiful to behold.
Tammy, I’m going to agree with everyone when I say your pieces are wonderful and so are your posts! I always enjoy reading them. I think you did a fantastic job on the hawk – we always see our flaws but they aren’t so obvious to everyone else! And you do always make so many things for these challenges, it’s rather impressive! I’m so glad you continue to participate!
Wow!! You always blow me away with how many pieces you are able to finish for these challenges. I really love the hawk necklace but then when I got to the owl….my absolute favorite piece. The owl on the box is lovely as is the pygmy owl nested in the cactus but oh my-that owl necklace. Just love it!!
Just love your focal pieces – the hawk and owl are amazing!
I love the humor you injected into this post. Such a delightful read. Your work is impressive. I absolutely love the owl in the cactus vessel!
Such an abundance of designs! I love the ethnic route you took with the jewellery and I think the composition of the box is great.
What fabulous designs! Your owls are fantastic, and the cactus pot is just perfect. I disagree about the realism, I think you nailed it!
I loved watching your sneak peeks on facebook this month, but the end results are just stellar. My favorite is the vessel, but part of that is simply that I find desert owls so charming. Maybe it’s their look of surprise at being photographed? Or their little feather trousers? I’m not sure, but your little guy definitely adorable!
Thanks for letting us know your beads didn’t turn out the way you wanted them but I still love them, sorry 🙂 I’d prefer a realistic creature to an abstract one so I assume yours are realistic but with a pinch of artistic imagination. I love reading about your process even though I don’t work with polymer clay – different media, same feelings 🙂 That said, I just fell in love with the little fellow nesting in the cactus – I hadn’t heard about these owls and just spent ten minutes looking at pictures on Google before posting this comment 🙂
Great job with all of your projects, Tammy! I love the super-cute cactus owl vessel. 🙂 And regardless of what you say, and of my belief that sculpting is prone to butchering (stubby fingers or not), you have done really well with your hawk and owl! Stylistic, real-ish interpretations always look fabulous, and I, at least, like them better than super-realistic ones.
Tammy,no matter what you say and even if it IS your blog, the colors on your Hawk are really a success!! They look like leather pieces! Of course, I love all your creations, and cactus owl is so cute. And I love your humor in telling it all.
I just can repeat myself (and others): I enjoy every time looking at your creations for the theme challenge and I am always looking forward to it! To read about your thoughts and inspirations, to see your creation process as well as the finished pieces, is such a joy! You bird necklace are my favorites, they look wonderful! 🙂
Woman – you’ve got mad skill! I really loved seeing your pieces and process 🙂
Realism is over rated but your pieces are definitely more realistic than not. You have created amazing birds that are easily recognisable. I LOVE them!! My favourite is actually the hawk I like the darker colouring and the way it of sets the shape of the bird and even that it isn’t quite realistic but not quite whimsical just perfectly in the middle!
Well dang! I’m always amazed at how much mileage you get out of the theme challenges! I love everything and I don’t think the wash ruined the hawk at all. And of course you can show things you made in the past too. Lol! I really do love that owl you made just before the theme was announced. And what good luck about the snow day because I think the cactus is my favorite. Looks fairly realistic to me!
I loved reading about your art journey and seeing your finished creations. I thought your clay sculpting skills were magnificent and your level of detail superb. I loved seeing your creativity shine through with each piece you made. I had to laugh when you mentioned lack of sketching skills – we are so much alike! I was an undergrad biology student too with no chance to talk drawing classes and had major frustration whenever I had to draw anything for a lab. It was always an amorphous blob. I sketch now during meetings too but could definitely use some classes! Great work!
I can’t believe how many pieces you created and they are all so beautiful, I would not worry too much about being realistic your pieces have character and charm and that is much more appealing, delightful!
Tammy,
Your pieces are awesome! I am sorry – but I love how the red tail hawk came out. But I feel your pain – not the way you saw your piece – but someone will always love what you don’t!
I love reading your process and I think you have made skills in the finer details of your pieces (I love those individual feathers on the hawk and owl necklace!).
Wow. You have a parliament here. A parliament of owls! I love them – and again we are kindred spirits creating in similar ways! Guess I need to try polymer over a tin, dont I? You have done wonderful things! I am puzzled by your darkening of the wash after a re-cure. I do that sometimes, and havent noticed such a change. Hmm. Interesting!
Glad you could join us! Sorry i was a bit late to the hop!
Sorry to be hopping so late! As always, I’m amazed at what you’re able to accomplish with polymer clay! You’re barn owl necklace and the cactus with nesting owl are my faves, but I’m partial to owls. So much delightful creativity!