Unfortunately, I have had very little time to work on my owl project this week. I only managed to add some talons to the feet. Owls do not tippy toe around like Sandpipers. They have large rough feet with sharp claws built for grabbing and holding their prey. I needed the toes to be larger and add the claws.
I had already given the toes a little bit of bulk by dripping some hot glue along the top. That helped give the toes a rougher look. That only worked a little bit. By the time I was ready to work on the feet, some of that had peeled up. I ended up pulling some of it off.
To create the claws, I cut small crescents out of cardboard. I needed two for each claw I was trying to create. Owls have three toes in front and one in the back, so I needed a total of sixteen crescents for this project. I taped the front of the downward facing crescents together, then opened up the back of each crescent to form a wedge. This wedge was then hot glued to the existing toe and then covered with tape. I lost a bit of the crescent shape when I added the tape. The main idea at this point is just to make the toes look like sharp talons. More detail will be added with paint.
I also bulked up the legs by wrapping them in some aluminum foil and tape. I may yet add more to the foot. Sometimes I have to walk away from the project and come back to it before I make a decision on adding more. Adding too much is as bad as not adding enough.
Extending the toes had an added bonus. It gave the owl a little more stability. The owl does not rock back on its tail as much as it had before. I may need to make one correction on one of the toes, as it does not sit quite touch the ground. This is an easy fix. I'll just add a little more tape to the area.
Last blog post I had mentioned that there was a change in direction in the project. I wanted to give readers a heads up. My original intention for this project was to cover the entire owl in paper mâché and then paint it. And herein lies a cautionary tale as to why showing your work before it is complete can be problematic at times.
The cardboard "feathers" of the owl really give the bird its shape. All of the people I have shown it to have said I should not cover up the feathers. They think I should just paint it. In any case, I will still need to put paper mâché on the beak and feet. I admit, by the time I had come this far with the project and saw how nice the owl looked, I wished I had done it in balsa wood rather than cardboard. I am torn between sticking to my original plan or switching horses in mid-stream and going a different route. Am I prepared to potentially wreck a project?
I was not sure how the cardboard is going to react to being painted. It could curl up or separate into its many layers if it gets too wet. It might be fine. I'll never know unless I try it. I have some options here. If the paint works as hoped, the project is close to complete. If the cardboard curls, I may still be able to cover it with paper mâché. In any case, I will still need to put paper mâché on the beak and feet at a minimum as they are only covered with masking tape at this point.
My last resort scenario if the cardboard fails beyond use, I could strip the project back to the layer where it was waterproofed with a layer of Press and Seal and start over from there. It would not be a complete rebuild. If I end up doing that, it might be worthwhile to pursue the balsa wood angle. However, I don't think it will come to that. I have done a few test pieces of cardboard to see how it responds to the primer. It has done just fine. I think it is going to be okay to paint.
So, I plan to go ahead and just use paint. It may be for the best as the feathers give it a lot of texture. But, for all of that, if I had waited and showed off a finished paper mâché project, they would still have looked at it for twenty seconds and said, "Wow, that looks cool."
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