Whooper Swans, 3D, paper sculpture



copyright

These swans took months to learn how to make. I only ended up with one set for a friend who suffered greatly with health issues. The swans were adapted from 3d Animal PDF file from the Canon art website, shown below, if the link does not work try to copy and paste it into your search engine.
http://cp.c-ij.com/en/contents/3157/03383/index.html

The heads of the swans are made with quilling strips, 216 inches of strips (they come in 24 inch lengths and must be glued together to get such a length), 108 inches for each half of each head. Each half must be shaped by carefully cupping the flat roll of quilling strips, then glued into this shape without flattening it again and then glued together. There is an added piece of quilling strip around the center to keep the two halves of the head together, then squeezed into a head shape. I had to play with the size of the head to get the right size to fit, so it took several tries. The eyes are from an ash leaf punch and colored in with colored pencil.
 
The size of the bird took a lot of experimenting to get it to fit the size I wanted. The neck took the longest to experiment with the right pieces from the original and playing with the angles. The baby swan is the part I used for this.
 
With the head being made differently than the original design I was free to make the head turn in whatever direction I wanted.

The bodies of the swans are covered with 431 individually placed feathers to give them more of a real look. First I had to fringe ¼” quilling strips with a fringe tool, with approximately 18 to 21 cuts per inch of over 500 inches of worth of strips.
 
There are 110 pieces to the grass and 15 white flowers added with the lilies and their pads all together there are 150 pieces.
 
This piece of artwork require 596 pieces and literally months of work to complete beginning with the design stage all the way to the last lily added.  This is part of the reason I switched to graphic design.  The amount of work required for these birds in paper takes a lot more time than I have to dedicate to them.
 
Therefore I started to play with the graphic version of the paper artwork I once did, below is just one example of what we will begin to offer at our Etsy shop, plus a scene that will include these swans.

For the swan graphic please visit our shop under the page of "Nature and Scenes", thank you.
Mrs. J.