American Bald Eagle 2023

Today I'm working on a great commission for an American collector of a life-sized American bald eagle. This is going to be going outside a house, mounted on a natural boulder of granite, overlooking an estuary, so it's going to be a really cool position. The first stage of any sculpture is to make an armature. An armature is designed really just to hold the weight of the clay, because if you imagine making a wing, the thickness of the wing is just going to fall apart if you don't have any support structure. Each feather has been... I bought the skin of an American bald eagle from a taxidermist, and I've had each feather laser cut because I want to get the sense of each feather overlapping like they do. A lot of bird wing templates I can cut out of one sheet, whereas this one I very much want to overlap. So when you see it from behind, you'll get a sense of the air coming through the feathers. I've reinforced the wing with fibreglass. I've stuck mesh on the outside to give the clay something to hold on to. I've got a fairly adaptable head at the moment, with an armature coming down to the beak. The tail I've made in the same fashion out of perforated steel, which has all been laser cut. And the feet and the claws I've made out of aluminium, and we use aluminium. I use aluminium because it stays where you bend it, it's got no spring to it. So this has been quite a complicated armature. It's taken a while to get it right. And the idea is this bird would have come in that direction and seen something over here and was banking around to go back for it. And it would be mounted somewhere around here, it would work with this. So once we get on to the clay, I'm using a new clay for me. It's a paper flax clay. Quite expensive, but really good. It doesn't crack when it dries out, so it will be more forgiving when I'm working on the wing tips and things. So the next step is clay. Thanks for watching!