Screwed and glued together

     I hope it wasn't a mistake, but I couldn't wait and this morning I screwed and glued the wings in place.  My rationalization is that I can now sculpt the body and wings together as a unit and achieve better and more realistic integration.  I will work slowly, transforming the clunky, thick shape into a more realistically slim bird.  Slowly, slowly -  that will be my mantra while carving.

    The screws visible in the photo below of the top of the carving will be removed tomorrow, after allowing the glue to dry for 24 hours.  I will then drive dowels into the screw holes, to reduce the need for wood filler.  I wish I could have put in the screws from the belly side, but the geometry and the thickness of the body piece would have made that very difficult.

    From the photos above, the general configuration of the carving is discernible.  The larger squares on the green grid are 1", so the wingspan, even with the wings partially folded, is close to two feet.

    The boys were over today (it's Mother's Day, after all) and one of them asked how I planned to display the carving.  He suggested that having it mounted on the wall would be the best way to both accentuate the action inherent in the carving and disguise the mounting mechanism.  I will keep that in mind, especially since we are running out of display space in our house because of ship models on shelves and carvings on tables.

    I have drawn on the anterior edge of the wing blanks an outline to guide my initial shaping of the wings.  I will first focus on the area where the wings meet the back of the bird, using photographs of diving osprey as a guide to the surface configuration in this area.

    It seems like it has a taken a long time to get to the stage of actually carving, but it has not really been that long, about a week.  I have just been thinking or agitating about this or that, and that makes it all seem longer.