Paper Birds or Vegan Taxidermy


Vegan Taxidermy featured at Live Worms Gallery show 2008


In my many adventures in experimenting with sculpting techniques, I began using packing foam sheets as a way of getting basic forms to later be covered with other media (paper mache, fake fur...etc).  I can't recall what inspired me to begin trying to make birds.  It is probably because the retail store, The Tail of the Yak, that I worked in breifly often had real taxidermied birds which were both beautiful and repulsively creepy.

Saw Whet owl and Red Wing Black Bird (which is also actually a small box)

American Goldfinch

I tried using paper to be able to hopefully capture some of the beauty of birds without the creepiness.  At least it gave me an excuse to closely examine many photographs of birds and pay extra attention to them any time I saw them.    I have only made a few, but I am hoping to make a whole series of wading shore birds if I can get ahold of the right quality of crepe paper.  My skills in making fake birds came in handy when I decided to make my Musicians of Bremen halloween costume, and needed a rooster.

I made these egrets for myself in 2000. I used a soft regular quality white crepe paper. At that time, I had much harder time finding the quality of crepe paper in colors I wanted for birds, so I chose to make an easy all white bird which did not have long wing or tail feathers which require a stiffer, heavier crepe paper to immitate.

These are life size doves that I made for Dovecote, a store in Connecticut. I always have a hard time trying to use crepe paper for the feathers, in that it never is available in gray. I used a light blue and painted it to make the mourning dove. Thankfully the special floral crepe paper that I use comes in brown and a variety of other colors that I can paint to approximate bird coloring, but it is still frustrating to not have a variety of natural colors to use.

A pair of Chinese style phoenixes are still at Castle in the Air in Berkely. Making fantasy birds is fun and easy because I can make up the proportions and colors of the birds...no worrying about trying to get true anatomical detail.

smaller phoenix for Castle in the Air, 2003

larger phoenix made with german florist crepe paper and rainbow metallic crepe

Life size White Stork was on display with baby merchandise at Castle in the Air.

Cygnus Atratus, black swan --it really looks like that

I have been known to make birds for special custom orders, however I tend to be limited by the colors of crepe paper to some degree. Also, I am currently unable to take orders for anything until further notice.