Arming the raptor

 So, wings.

The wings I've sculpted so far are the forearm and the hand of each limb, so time to attach them to the body and make upper arms. I did this to one wing at a time, starting with the left one here. First I twisted the wires on the body and the wing together. Which sounds simpler than it was, but I eventually got the wing to stay in place pretty securely.

After posing the wing a bit, I added foil, to fill out the arm and to support the feathers with a flat sheet of foil on one side. Then I covered all of that in sheets and bits of clay.

Then shaping and smoothing, using my trusty sewing pin, silicon brush, the loop of wire I've used before, and one of my darning needles, and occasionally cutting away clay at various places with the craft blade. At one point I realized the wing is too broad at the upper arm, and cut away a bigger chunk of both the clay and the foil with small scissors.

The underside of the wing has some fluffier feathers near the body, which I drew and carved with the loop of wire and darning needle, mostly. On the topside there's a bit of that, too, but the more defined individual feathers extend closer to the body.

After I was mostly finished with the first wing, I baked it. The area around the shoulder is not finished yet, I'll probably do that after attaching the head and sculpting the neck.

The process was the same for the other wing. Except for the cutting away with scissors.

The two feathers defined at the edge here are still flight feathers, attached to the elbow. The flight feathers don't extend up the upper arm, and the "armpit" feathers are softer, and generally not very visible on birds. Skye doesn't have bird wings or really even deinonychosaur wings, hers are really just arms that grew feathers, and she doesn't hold them quite like wings a lot of the time, both having gotten used to not having anything attached to them and because of their different articulation from fully functional wings. The gap between the back of the upper arm and the body should probably be more prominent, with just a thin arm and no skin flaps for the feathers to attach to, but I couldn't help myself. Go fluffy or go home. (And well, maybe her arms at least get really buff from all the wingflapping.)

Just before baking...

And after. Should do something about this headless chicken's headlessness next.