Thursday, September 9, 2010

Expressive birds

So I wonder if you noticed anything different about my bronze bird that I photographed yesterday???



If you look carefully, you may see that, unlike my other birds, this little bronze guy has eye lids and eye brows too!  and yes, a little topknot feather.  Can you see?

I guess my not including eye lids before was an anatomical error as all birds have eye lids. In fact birds have three eye lids - an upper one, a lower one and a nictitating membrane.  Unlike us, however, their moveable lid is the lower one.  As that looks a little odd to us - I gave this guy moveable upper lids instead!

And as for the eyebrows?  Well - no. Birds don't have eyebrows - but I have artistic license!


So how come my new bird has two new anatomical features?  Well, I started a cartooning class last week!  I can't draw and don't particularly want to learn to draw "regular" things - but I thought cartooning might be fun.

When I met my tutor, he'd looked at my website and jewelry etc and he decided that I was a "three dimensional cartoonist!"  I like that phrase!  I started work on drawing cartoons based on Humphrey and Trisha ...... I have a lot to learn but in the process we spoke about expressions and how eye lids and eye brows add to expressions - and voila!  My sculpted birds now have lids and brows so I can start working on different expressions!

I have my second lesson today.  Looking forward to it.  I can see that my sculpting and my cartooning will be switching back and forth with me learning things in one and adding it to the other and vice versa!  And my goal is to be able to show you some little cartoons here on my blog.  Hope they won't cause too many raised eye brows!

1 comment:

Sue McNenly said...

What an awesome class to take to tie in with your current art. Can't wait to see "Suave Humphry" or "Sexy Trisha" with the bedroom eyes.....I'm sure you were thinking of that......weren't you..........