BlackBerry Beard's Mechanical BlueJay Design Process

My focus this past week was to design Captain Blackberry Beard's Mechanical BlueJay that sits on his shoulder. The idea is that Captain Blackberry Beard does not want to be like other pirates and have a parrot on his shoulder. He always wanted a bluejay, even though they don't generally live on the high seas. So, he decided to create a robot blue jay. 

This was a rather difficult assignment that I gave myself. So I started from square one. What makes a blue jay a blue jay? I looked for references of blue jays and proceeded to draw them. I tried to capture as many details as possible. Elements of importance that I noticed were their pointed head shapes and markings on their wings.

After drawing bluejays I then asked myself about the mechanics of a bird's wings. How are they constructed? What do they look like when they are opened and what do they look like when they close. I looked at several anatomy charts of birds wings and how the feathers are in section both on the outside and the inside of the wing. I did tons of drawing studies of wings like this. I managed to post a few on here.

The final part of the process was the most difficult because it required me to take what I learned about bird's wings and blue jays and create a functional robot model of a blue jay. So, I would have to approach all of the bird's organic anatomy as if it was a metal robot.

I began to do a lot of research into robot designs, specifically Capcom's Mega Man series of simple shaped robot designs. Subconsciously, the head design seems to be a combination of Magneto from X-men's helmet along with the pointed fin design of the Rocketeer's helment. His body basically is Mega Man's Xbuster hand shape. I also looked at several metal sculptures of steampunk and mech blue jays. However, most of these designed that I looked at did not have functioning wings. Either the wings were stationary and closed or they only remained opened.

I was baffled at first with how to handle the wings but after a few days, I came up with the idea to make a hinge attached to the Blue Jay's body that attaches to a metal arm. As you can see from this drawing above, there is a half circle shape attached to the metal arm. when the half circle shape extends outward, the arm gets longer and opens the wings.

I also wasn't sure about how to attach the legs because generally, birds legs would come out of the front of the torso. But, my design choice was to have the legs come out of the sides of the bird so that it can turn sideways and morph into a cannon airplane like the image below.