Been in a "fowl" mood.....

hehehehe, I love puns!  Seriously, and more specifically, I've been in a owl mood.  I've made 3 owl pieces in the last month.  This is the big one, and it actually started as a sketch, sort of.  Early last year, I started this owl on a vintage porcelain pocket watch face.  Since it's porcelain I added an extra layer of resin on top of it, since porcelain can be very fragile.  Then I didn't know where to go with it.


If you actually follow my blog, you know that I'm trying to finish up UFO's (UnFinished art Objects) the last couple of months.  So my brain has had this incomplete owl and watch face lurking in my brain... I had a dream during the night of 3/17/17 -- and it was massively weird dream, I won't burden you with the details - but I woke up and drew the below sketch.  This design was the most normal part of the dream actually.

It still wasn't a complete idea, but at least it got me started again.  I thought I would build a larger necklace using a wing with the owl and face on it, and add stuff til it looked right.  That is seriously how most of my pieces get built lately.. I just start laying stuff out and eventually it looks right to me.


I have these large wings, like 6 inches across, but it just didn't look right to me.  the width of the wing was 2 skinny, you couldn't see the wing under the face.. and that ruined the look I wanted.  So I dug some more in my pile and found this great feather.  I also added one of my large old clock gears in the background for more visual impact.

I laid out a bunch of watch and clock parts until it looked good to me... here is what I liked layout wise.

Then it was time to actually construct the piece with rivets and screws and a touch of glue.  I mostly use glue to hold stuff in place when I am using more delicate materials.  Since the owl is already on the face, I didn't want this face to move.  it's screwed and riveted just in the middle, so I used glue to keep the 12 at the top.

Here's the thing with layout vs. actually constructing the piece... things often change.  In this case, as I was drilling holes for the screws/rivets, at one point I flipped the feather in the other direction.. and l liked how that looked even more!  So some of the other components had to be rearranged as well.

This piece has some real 3D layering going on, and the top small gear spins pretty well.  I used some new heavy brass chain I recently found... I'm really pleased how this all came together.  This Piece will be one of the "big" necklaces making it's debut at Downtown Des Moines Farmer's Market May 6th.