A week ago a dear friend asked me to make a very specific art piece for her husband for his birthday. She has bought my soft sculpture before so knew what I could do, even if there are days I’m not quite so sure. Anyway, I finished the piece with 2-hours to spare (oh yeah).  Here are a few pictures…

Yes, that is a stogie that he is smoking. He’s about 12” tall.

For the pattern I started with the raptor pattern from Abby Glassenberg’s book, The Artful Bird. However, by the time I finished I had totally changed the head, I wired the wings to give them shape, I reshaped the body and did the feet in a slightly different way. But Abby’s book is amazing so if you are interested in creating your own beautiful birds, you should check out her book.

For this project I used real glass eyes ordered from an online taxidermy supply company. They are relatively inexpensive (almost the same price as a pair of larger plastic eyes) so totally worth ordering.