Fiery throated Hummingbird

EDIT: this little pendant is now up for sale on my etsy

This is an entry for the August monthly theme "Creatures that fly" of

This little one was kind of hard to capture, he kept evading focus.

This little guy is a fiery throated hummingbird. He was created totally on a whim, as I’ve seen a picture of this beautiful little bird on the instagram feed of national geographics and I absolutely had to make him! The sculpting part was comparatively simple as I just did the basic shape of the hummingbird and the large feathers of the wings and tail in polymer clay and added all the small feathers in paint. The neat thing (and also sometimes the pain) about sculpting that small is that practically EVERYTHING leaves a texture so creating something that small and with so many colours would actually probably have been too hard to sculpt.

Originally I had planned the twig to be from Fimo as well but I couldn’t get it to the shape I wanted so I used one from a bush outside our house and baked it for a little bit to get rid of (hopefully) most of the moisture. The base was the part I had the most troubles with. I couldn’t quite decide how to pull it off; the twig couldn’t just grow from the ground but I couldn’t come up with a way to make it seem like there was a bush or tree the twig stuck out from. The base I went for in the end thus is a bit of a compromise, I’m nonetheless fairly happy with. In order to make this sculpt sturdy I strengthened the little feet with resin.

The glass dome (which is not shown in these pictures) measures roughly 18 by 30mm which leaves the total height of the hummingbird at about 10mm.

I’m still undecided on the title of this one. The first one that jumped out to me was “a pride bird”, then I came up with “jewel of the woodlands”, but I also considered just putting down the latin name “Panterpe Insignis”. What do you guys think?

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