Birds - securing and painting

I have been making birds in stained glass for a while, firstly I had them hanging, which is great for the window, but I wanted to have legs if they were standing and thought they looked a little lost with their legs dangling, so have more recently been mounting them on driftwood.

The legs of these are only attached to a small bit of the soldered copper foil and so the legs need very careful handling. As my birds have proven so popular and I am being commissioned to make particular ones, and sell them at wildlife centres and galleries, I have been working on making the attachment of the legs more robust by taking wire along the higher solder joins, as in this Oystercatcher:

As I have developed my practice I have been making more complex birds such as this Red Kite

This piece is quite time consuming as each of it's feathered ends of the wings are an individual piece of glass, and the smaller the pieces are, the more difficult they are to cut. This has motivated me to get out my glass paint powders and I am hoping to produce some painterly detail which will take my birds to another level of art and craft. Look out for the results on my next blog...