Creating these polystyrene wings was a big-scale prop made to be a perfect photo opportunity. This project helped develop my poly carving skills, teamwork, time management and rendering.

This project was a group project, myself and four other classmates worked together to bring to life the 7.4 meter long raven wings.

First step of this project was research, the reason the wings were being made was because of the local historical legend of Bran the Celtic giant.

The most important part of designing the wings was making it clear that they were bird wings and not angel wings.

We also wanted to include the Celtic aspect of the legend. So we looked at different knots we could carve into the polystyrene, eventually choosing to go with the Trinity Knot.

We played around a few ideas on what the shape of the wings would look like until settling on the final maquette. From here we started on bringing the wings to life.

The poly carving took three weeks. This includes all the gluing, carving, sanding and scrimming of the polystyrene. We created the back and front of each wing separately. Creating four pieces in total.

With the polystyrene done, we then created a metal framework to sandwich between the front and back of the wings. This was to give the wings support because of their size, and also give us a strong anchor point for the metal pole to be attached, so the wings could stand.

With the wings up and stable we began the painting. First, we had to idenden the wings so that they’d be fire and water retardant. We then moved onto colour samples before painting the actual wings.