Man-made Pigeon Head Tester

Ok so whilst i have been waiting for my rat to arrive (my pigeon as finally arrived already but need both to continue) I decided to have a go at making a life like on or as close as a real one as i could with things dotted around the room.

On a previous post i showed my design and the paper mache ball i made. The paper mache ball is for the head and i added (see photo below) a material chest to allow room for movement. I used a basic cotton blend fabric, something that was just lying around my house.

I then used hot glue gun to secure in place. Where they are fixed together there is a hole on the inside. This, in theory would have been big enough for a hand to control the mouth. Since this was too small and i didnt want to make the head any bigger, i decided i could secure a wooden rod so i could control the head movements.

 

 

Then i added the feathers that i brought from the Birmingham Rag market last week. They are the closest thing that ive seen to pigeon feathers. I started by adding the feathers on the bottom first so that they would lie on top of each other better. I used a hot glue gun to do this step.

 

 

However i then decided to use a hair clip for the beak. Then realised that I hadnt brought the right sized hair clip and it didnt look that good in proportion. So i decided to make a smaller version. Because this was smaller i could make it out of super sculpey - a polymer clay that needs to go in the oven to set. I made a head, neck, eyes and part of the beak all separate so i could glue it all together during the process.

 

 

Then once cool from the oven i glued the head and neck together and attached the beak. I then started to add on the feathers appropriately.

 

 
After spending a good hour individually gluing on all the feathers to the head piece i then started to tidy up the feathers and glued on the other features, again using hot glue gun. I then painted the features and this is the end product. I think it works well and could be pulled off in a video if needed. i could of potentially used a lighter material but using polymer clay allowed me to sculpt the shape instead of guessing with a balloon and paper mache!