One of my favorite creatures from film is Fawkes the phoenix from Harry Potter, so I wanted to create a mechanical puppet. I had previous experience with featherwork from creating microraptor puppets, so this process was pretty smooth from start to finish. Fawkes is 3 feet tall with a 6 foot wingspan and weighs about 20 pounds. There are around 2,000+ feathers glued in place. The skin on the face is made of latex while the beak is epoxy and fiberglass. The tongue is silicone, and entire understructure of the creature is fiberglass cut into sections so it can articulate. It took me about 3 months to complete this puppet from start to finish. 

I started out with a sketch of Fawkes but featherless so I could sculpt the body accurately. My main reference for this concept was a featherless lovebird named Blondie. I looked at how Blondie moved and made sure to keep the range of motion in mind when sculpting.

I had an armature welded by my go-to welder, Mark, who always provides the sculptures I do with a sturdy structure, since these armatures need to hold up hundreds of pounds of weight without collapsing (sometimes up to 3,000 pounds!), but Fawkes was around 300. The armature is galvanized steel to ensure it wouldn't break. The sculpture took me a week to do since the only detailed part I had to work on was the face, given the fact there weren't any feathers present in that area.

The sculpture was then molded using epoxy and fiberglass. I drilled holes in parts of the mold to keep it together when I would cast the head in latex. The rest of the mold was later used to create a core, which served as the skeleton of the final puppet that would house the mechanical components inside and allow the feathers and fabric to lay on top of.