In 2001 I took a class from JoAnn Pinto.  She is an exceptional dollmaker.  The class was “Birds and Their Companions”.  It taught us how to transform a photograph into a 3-D object. I chose to make a hummingbird.  I have always loved hummingbirds.  I love how tiny and animated they are and how fiesty they are!  It turned into a project of epic proportions!

This is a picture of the finished hummer:

We started with a picture.  That gave us the basic shape.  We made a 3-D wire shape from the picture and then covered it.  At the end of a week-long class this is how far I’d progressed.  He had feet, a head, a beak, and a body.  He looked more like a giant bug than a hummingbird:

The next step was to cover the body with batting and stuff it:

From there, it was a matter of adding feathers – hundreds of feathers, each made individually, each two sided!  In the next couple of photos you can see the tail feathers being applied.  They are green on the top and grey on the underside.

The feathering took a LONG time (thus the saga):

I finally finished him!  He proudly flies in my studio!

The original concept was that he was going to have a companion – a little girl who was holding a string onto which he was attached – like a balloon flying in the air.  This is as far as I got with the companion:

Perhaps one day he will have his companion.  Or perhaps he will just fly free in my studio forever!