Pteranodon Armature

The sculpture I am working on at the moment is going to consist of three parts. These will be my two principal characters and the base.

I have already assembled my Kong armature. Now I am in the process of cobbling together the armature for Kong's adversary - a Pteranodon!

For those of you that may not be familiar with the film King Kong(1933) the Pteranodon is the flying reptile that foolishly tries to snatch Fay Wray away from Kong.

The first step in roughing out the armature was scaling up the size of the reptile to my Kong figure. I'm lucky in that my nephew bought me the two disc special DVD put out by Warner Brothers of the film for my birthday. It proved great as reference material. I was able to freeze frame the scene where the two creatures battle each other to get an idea of their relative sizes.

Using aluminium wire I laid out the shape of the pteranodon being careful to leave extra wire in the neck,wings and leg areas. I then twisted green floral wire around the torso and added a few drops of Zap a Gap glue to lock everything together.

Next I carved a wooden skull adding Zap a Gap to the tip of the beak area to penetrate and help strengthen the wood in this delicate area. For the same reason I added a stiff piece of metal rod to the rear of the crest on the reptile's skull.

Sections of wood were added to the wing areas to insure they would bend like the actual creatures wings would. The torso was then bulked up with some aluminium foil. Now that I have my two characters fleshed out I can go about designing the base for this sculpture.