Wings and tail

     I spent about 4 hours this hot afternoon working on the wings and tail of the osprey carving.  On the wings, I worked on defining the feathers on the leading edges of the wings, and some of the contour feathers on the underside of the right wing.  There are so many of these feathers, and defining them is only the first part of a process involving defining and texturing and/or burning.

    I had not done too much work on the tail before today.  All I had done was to define the dorsal surfaces of the twelve tail feathers, and today I worked on the ventral surface, on the belly and rump coverts bordering the tail feathers.  Parts of this job were hard, because of the direction of the grain, the direction of rotation of the bits, the difficulty in reaching some of the spots, and the fact that I am right-handed and not ambidextrous.  The result of today's work is shown in the photos below.

    The first photo shows the rump area and the dorsal surface of the tail feathers.  The pattern of overlap produces one feather in the middle that lies on top of the others and does not have an edge that extends below that of its neighbor.  There is an even number of tail feathers, so seven of them overlap one way, and the remaining five overlap the other way.  Seems odd, but vertebrate embryology favors bilateral symmetry, and there cannot be a feather that arises from the midline.

  

      The second photo shows the underside of the tail, and the contour feathers at the base of the tail in the area of the cloaca.  If my current idea about the way in which I will mount the carving holds true, this will be the (appropriate?) point at which the curved bar or rod is inserted into the carving.  The bar or rod will extend directly posteriorly parallel to the tail feathers and then curve around down to insert into a heavy, stable base.  

     The stiff tail feathers emerge from the body coverts as if the tail had been inserted into a slot at the posterior end of the body.  I therefore had to define the areas on the sides of the tail base where the tail feathers disappear into the contour feathers.  I got a good start on this area today, but my arthritic fingers were getting sore after four hours (even with a break for a Moxie'n'Morgan) and I had to stop.

    It was good to be carving again after a few days with multiple family obligations, although it was quite warm in the back yard even under a canopy.  Not complaining about the weather, though!

    After today, I have 58 hours invested in this project.  My estimate for total hours is at least 200.