Animals Part 1

2/18/21

I decided to study and model a Carolina parakeet because back home I have a pet parakeet and I’ve just always liked birds. I love their brightly colored feathers and how they all have unique personalities.

I did a lot of research about the Carolina parakeet and I learned that they were social, loud, and playful. One of my favorite facts is that they eat poison berries and were thought to be poisonous due to these berries. They were also unique due to how they shared nests among each other instead of each bird having their own like most species. However, they are unfortunately extinct. Here is some notes and sketches that I took on these birds:

Here is the short story I wrote about what I learned about the Carolina parakeet:

I gaze across the canopy of trees at the hundreds of birds, all covered in a distinct brilliant green plumage with a spattering of yellow and orange on our heads. My noisy flock of 200 Carolina Parakeets is currently residing in a marsh in southern Illinois, all nesting in large hollow cypress and sycamore trees. While my flock typically stays in the midwest, I’ve heard of flocks reaching all the way from southern New England and New York and Wisconsin to Kentucky, Tennessee and the Gulf of Mexico. We also have a vast amount of us west of the Mississippi River, as far west as eastern Colorado. Similar to my flock’s marsh, most of our kind roosts in wetland along rivers, especially the Mississippi.

I decide to venture out of my nest that I share with 29 other birds and forage for some food. The easiest thing to do is to eat some seeds from the sycamore trees that my flock is nested in, but I tire of seeds. Even though we can eat seeds from cypress, hackberry, beech, sycamore, elm, pine, maple, oak, and other plants such as thistles and sandspurs, I can’t help but crave fruit. But which fruit? I could steal some apples, grapes or figs from a nearby orchard, but I’m looking for some cockleburs. Cockleburs even contain a toxin that makes me poisonous to predators. I should also try and find a salt lick.

Speaking of predators, I’m careful as I fly around looking for cockleburs to avoid hunters. Recently there have been a lot of members of my flock dying off from being hunted for our colorful feathers and because farmers are upset we are eating their crops. The biggest issue is how social we are so when one bird is killed by a hunter we all go to help them and make more of us vulnerable. We can’t help that we’re hungry, humans are taking away the forests that we live in too so we can’t nest or get seeds. They also trap us to keep as pets.

I decide to go back to my nest and see some of my friends. We are very social birds so I love to spend time with other Carolina parakeets. As I fly I squawk loudly. I love making noise, our flock can be heard as far as 48 km from our nesting site. I reach my nest and spend some time preening other birds before roosting a bit and then sunbathing. It’s beginning to get a bit cold, sometimes I wish I was a bird that migrated.

2/24/21

Today I started developing my model of the parakeet after looking through some reference images:

I also looked at a lot of pictures of sun conures since they are the closest living relative to the Carolina parakeet, especially after I decided to do my model with the wings out. I originally wanted to make my model with foldable wings, but I decided instead to focus more on making the bird as accurate as possible instead of making a complicated mechanic. There weren’t really any pictures of the Carolina parakeet with its wings out so I used the sun conure as a reference for the wing structure.

Here is what I came up with for my first model:

I had a lot of trouble getting the pieces to glue together due to the plastic I chose, so I opted for tape. I tested tacky glue and super glue on my plastic as well. Hot glue just puts holes in the thin plastic and other glues don’t seem to grip it. I had a difficult time with the beak too because it was so small compared to the rest of the bird. I put the wings on hinges so they could flap up and down as my interaction, but I’m not sure if I want to keep the zip ties because I think they take away from the form. I really enjoy how the feathers overlap over each other and you can see the layers with this plastic. I also think this plastic adds to making the bird seem light and airy and like it could actually fly.

2/26/21

After feedback from the last class, I decided to lose the feathers for my model and instead focus more on the shapes of the part of the body. This was a little disheartening to be honest because I really liked how the wings looked with the layering of the feathers, but the assignment is to study the shapes of the animals. I remade the wings and the tail and this is what I ended up with:

I felt like something was off with this model, but couldn’t figure out what. I tried to create both the implication of the feathers and the correct thickness for the wings by layering plastic. I also cut slits into the tail to create the illusion of feathers. I also switched all of my white masking tape to clear tape or glue to keep the white tape from taking away from the form.

3/8/21

I wanted to spend some time redoing the wings on my bird after getting some feedback from Q who pointed out that they resembled more airplane wings than bird wings. I looked at some pictures of bird wing anatomy and based my design on this picture:

I sketched out this general shape on a piece of paper and then taped it to my larger green pop bottle before cutting it out. I then flipped over the stencil and did this again for the other wing. I wanted to create the illusion of feathers and give my wings a little more of a curvature for the shoulders and thickness so I took my stencil and cut it down to create the top layer of feathers shown in the photo and cut out another layer of plastic. You can see the new wings here:

I also took the time to make a new tail without the cuts that I previously implemented since Q also said that they are too detailed for the rest of the bird. I ended up also taping the bottle that I used for my body closed so that there is a better flow from the body to the tail.

I also remade the beak so that it was cleaner and matched the rest of the bird better. I struggled a lot with the beak since it is so small to get the proportions and the shape right. I also redid the head on my bird because I felt that it extended out too far from the body and wasn’t quite the same shape. You can see it in this picture:

Overall I’m pretty happy with how my parakeet turned out, my main focus for most of the project was trying not to focus on the details and the feathers and instead make shapes that are accurate for a Carolina parakeet. I also spent a lot of time making the wings the right shape and representing feathers without making each individual feather. Here is my final model:

If I had more time I’d focus on the beak of my parakeet more and make it more accurate as well as making the interaction a little more developed. I also would’ve experimented more with different types of plastics and adhesives.