The Piasa Bird - his first appearance!!!

 

 

OK - Southwestern High School had their first home game and the Piasa Bird was unveiled with a grand spectical.  It was really fun to see him in action and hear the comments.  It went over really well, especially with the boys about 7 - 11 yrs.  Since the Bird was on the field people couldn't get very close - except a mom and little boy that get eaten, you'll see.


Here he is running thru smoke and cheerleaders.  I was hoping he'd eat a couple but no such luck.

 

 

Looks great running across the field!

Quietly approaching...
 

AAhhh... the puny humans have brought a sacrifice...

I bet I can eat all three of them!

Bbuuurrrrrppp....mmmm

 

 

A couple of close ups. I think he turned out pretty darn good!

Piasa Bird - the Final Ending!

The journey in creating the Bird is over.  Would I do this again?  Absolutely!!  It brought in many of the skills I've honed over the years and some new ones.  It was great fun and an even greater challenge.
This mascot of Southwestern High School will be unveiled at their first home game at the end of August.  I'll be there. 

Here I am with the completed project - my new best friend.  I will miss him.  (I'm on the left)

Here is the final mascot costume - The Piasa Bird!  There is no person in the costume in this shot.

Piasa Bird - Tail Section

This is the tail before it is sectioned off and dyed.

Here is the tail completely segmented and dyed.  I used an artist brush and painted on the brown dye.  I think it came out pretty cool.

Here's a close up of the tail where it attached to the body.  You can see the ties of black fabric I used to segment off the tail.

Piasa Bird - The Wings

When it came to the wings, I was crazed!  I designed  and discarded 3 ideas.

What I finally settled on was to make the wings actually part of the body of the costume.  A pvc pipe is inserted into the casing at the top of the wing and goes all the way to the wearers elbow.

They are quite large, about 5 feet each wing.  The fabric is very light weight so it really billows.

The wearers' hand comes out the the sleeve and grips the encased pvc pipe right about where the claws are.  The wearer has complete control of the manipulation of the wings!  I think they turned out great!

Piasa Bird - face and body

Here is the body , the scales section, attached to the face section.

View of the body from behind.  There are fins running down the back

These 2 pics show the beard added.  The wearer will see thru the mouth.

Piasa Bird - the Face

Sorry, I didn't rotate befor publishing! 

These are the face.  It's sculped by my little ole' hands with a needle and thread.  You remember Cabbage Patch dolls?  It's sculped like their faces were stitched.

Piasa Bird

This is upclose of the stitching that goes around the head of the beast.

I forgot to show you the teeth installed!  They look great.  I drilled a hole in the jaw for the wire armature to fit thru, twisted and tied the wire and used sylicone (?) to secure the terrible teeth in the jaws of death!

More Piasa Bird ..the journey continues!

OK, I am continuing with the creation of the Piasa Bird.  As it turns out, because of the color requirements of the clients I will be actually quilting, painting and dying the fabrics to create the image in my head.  Since the bird will sometimes be outside we went with cotton.

Wearable Art for a Juried Show

A couple of months ago I decided to enter a juried show at Jacoby Arts Center in Alton, IL.  Look this place up - IT'S GREAT!
Since my skill is in clothing construction I decided to do some wool felting and in some fashion, manipulate it into coat.  A coat makes a pretty good backdrop for surface designing and I love art to wear.
I started by felting or fulling 100% wool tweed.  When that was prepared I cut the 2 shades into 1/2" strips then pinned them to a board and wove the strips into a herringbone design.
For the back of the coat I cut the woven piece - a really BIG piece - on the bias.  The extra pieces were used for cuffs and an accent piece on the front.  I used lots of piping.  Gotta love piping!
I'll type more later...

Piasa Bird continues...

Here is a good side view of how the wood is setting on the frame.  I've put this on several times and had other put it on and it's really comfortable and not heavy.

Here is a side look at the skeleton.  More pieces will be added.  The strange shape at the top is the "spine".  Joe is shaping it to fit down the middle for additional support.

Partial foam core, partial plywood - skeleton in progress.

This is my carpeter and brother, Joe Guccione.  After I assembled the skeletal structure from foam core and attached it to an external back back frame, Joe took the whole thing, cut it from light weight plywood and attached it onto te frame.

www.lillianbydesign.com

Piasa Bird

The Piasa Bird has a beard or ruff under the chin.  There have been many renditions by artists so if you're interested in the variety of transformations of our great Bird just type it into the net and you'll get all the info.  As for the beard, I have dyed 3 mop heads after I took them apart.  I used black and brown, allowing some to remain in the dye bath longer than others in order to achieve a variety of shades and depth.

This is my greatest fan, my love and husband Corey.  Only he would be goofy for me!

Piasa Bird



The eyes will be glued, stitched and sculpted into place. 



These are the eyes for the Piasa Bird

Piasa Bird

I started with the teeth by using clay formed onto a wire armature.  After they clay dried I covered them in plaster casting, then painted.

Alright, first real blog! Well, Southwestern High School, Jerseyville, IL has contracted with me to create their mascot costume, the Piasa Bird. If you are not familiar with the Piasa (pie-a-saw) Bird legend - look it up! It's a great story. After studying him for a while now, I'm sure he was a reptile of some kind, a dragon of sorts.

This is an image of the Piasa Bird on the bluff walls in Alton, IL.  

An image of the Southwestern High School rendition.