In addition to the main Jabberwock sculpture, and the cat, I decided to make something smaller (or a few smaller somethings in fact), the Rocking Horse Fly creatures. I thought something which could be suspended from (or wired to) the branches of the trees around the formal gardens would add a bit of interest, and be a break from the sculpture building. Starting point was that winged-Sleipnir model again.
The initial sketches were quite angular, as the plan was to cut the bodies from scrap wood from work.
Then, in the run up to Christmas, I saw this ornament, and realised that where the Jabberwock was going to be harsh, all cold mechanisms and straight edges, producing something more curved and 'cute' would be a nice contrast...
Of course, this meant problems... cutting out lots of curved shapes on machine-saws would be very time consuming and tricky.
The final design sketch for the body...
...and two options for the wings. At this stage, printing the patterns onto acetate was planned.
As luck and provenance would have it though, I was learning to use the laser cutter at work, and the rocking horse fly design provided the perfect testbed for me to learn. Complex to draw, multi-layered, and with etched and cut details. I produced a couple at work from MDF...
And then experimented with some ghostly transparent versions, using some acrylic sheets leftover from the Model Village Project (moral of the story is never throw anything away).
These looked very nice, exactly what I was after (and worked out nicely in the job, for learning the intricacies of the cutter). But I didn't have too much in the way of clear acrylic in my own stock, and I suspected work might not be happy with me using their stock. Then I looked at the price of acrylic sheet available commercially, and panicked further. If I was going to do this, it would have to be MDF after all, though as it turned out the wooden look suited the concept and helped the pieces blend in a bit. I duly purchased my own 4ft by 8ft sheet of MDF...
Over the next few months, I gradually built up a group (herd? flock?) of parts, by either using the laser cutter on days when I was in but nobody else was, or by pasting parts into otherwise dead corners of work I was cutting for students, using up the scraps of material. Assembled with wood glue, then sprayed with varnish repeatedly, they looked pretty good.
It took a lot of work, and patience producing them piecemeal over the months; the pieces only really came together in the last couple of weeks. It was a pity I couldn't afford to do the component parts in plastic, transparent, as per the test piece, but actually they don't look too bad in wood. They weathered it all very well in the end, and all of the pieces survived the show and the awful conditions. I'm rather proud of the design actually, and they've proved popular since...
Oddly enough, after the design had been made I had opportunity to use it to make an actual miniature rocking horse for a room-set at work too...
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