Anatomy of birds, and feathers...

It is very different working on a character that is not a human. You can't just stand up and 'feel' how a certain movement works, and although it is quite easy to think of where the hair of a human grows and how the bones of its arms work, it is a lot more complicated to try and imagine how it feels to fold up a wing and to understand all the layers of primary, secondary and-endless-ary feathers.
Even though the characters in Fowl play were practically birds, they were a much simplified version. Really they were cartoon characters with human like behaviour, based on birds.

I did a lot of research already in the first two weeks, and keep researching more. The basic skeleton for most birds has a similar shape, but proportions are different for any kind of bird, so I will have to take those of a vulture in account mainly for my final design.

Getting the general skeleton shape of a bird right was not too difficult. Looking at several images and a real skeleton in the bristol museum and relating them to the 'skinned' bird helped me to figure out the working of the legs and feet, how and where the wing tails are attached and what is the basic shape of the skull and placing of the jaw bone. A first main challenge is now to understand how wings work. They are pretty complicated mechanisms. The initial bone structure isn't that complicated: it is practically like an arm, where the main feathers are attached to the lower arm and the hand. There are some small feathers on a seperate 'thumb', then the largest 'fan' of feathers is practically the birds' 'hand'. There are two main layers of feathers, then there are extra layers of small feathers going up to the hand. Another feather layer comes from the birds' body and from there joins up with the wing, but it is not attached to the wing. I am not exactly sure actually at the moment what is attached to the upper arm, something more to investigate...

Now the extra challenge is that feathers are not stiff: they move with the wind, and especially the long feathers will move in secondary actions with the bird's movements. This means that all the wing feathers have to be poseable. They have to swing up and down, but also fan in and out and curl up into a small package when the birds has its wing folded to its body, and with the same ease move out again into a huge spreaded shield. A lot more action analysis to do...

(above images are gathered from google as part of my research and I do not own them)

Below I scanned in some of my sketchbook work during my research into birds... I started looking at different birds and studying their anatomy, at the same time I was already sketching some rough ideas I got from that for the armature construction. Later I was trying to define more of the final character look, narrowing it down to a vulture kind of look, but still looking at what typical features of other birds and creatures I could use. Note that in the first drawings I'm even still considering bats, or bat type of wings, but I fell too much in love with the beautiful big bird of prey feathery wings.... A nightmare for stop motion puppets, so why not?

(the drawings are in sort of chronological order in which I drew them throughout my research)