Fairless Falcon

Art Project sponsored by Arts in Stark | Cardstock, Apoxy Sculpt | 15" x 10" x 8"

The Fairless School District was beginning the process of creating a 14’ welded sculpture of their falcon mascot. They partnered with Arts in Stark and asked me to calculate the placement, dimensions, and number of feathers for the sculpture. They were working with a local high school with a welding program, so I learned what I needed to about the process to complete the task. In the long run, they found they needed more help with the actual structural and welding aspects, so they found an amazing local welding artist to finish up their project.

I love my colorful rainbow falcon, even if he’s a bit chunky! I can’t remember why he ended up so thick… I think I started out 1:8 scale because I was worried the tiniest of wings would be difficult to cut to 1:10 scale in bulk accurately, but when he was half built I realized that it would be easier for everyone involved to make it 1:10. The only way I could calculate was to build a model, but I worked with the part of the base I had already built because the structure of the body wasn’t the task I was assigned.

The actual sculpture was to be built out of sheet metal, so it would be sophisticated and not rainbow colored. For my model I started with the custom cut long white feathers, then started adding feathers of different lengths and widths that would be replicate cut on a CNC machine. To keep track of the different sizes I used different colors of card stock for each size. The shop teacher just asked for the total square inches/feet of the feathers and they would configure the layout on the actual sheet metal, so my cute little bird translated into the table below.