Barn owl

Just another quick upload of a concept sketch and an exploration sketch of barn owls. I have gotten a bit stuck with my head armature so I'm giving it a little rest and working on something that i have wanted to do for a while now, which is making an owl puppet.

Truth be told that I used to be a very big birdwatcher and I still have a great interest in them I just don't get the time to do it anymore. My Grandad got me into it when I was about 11-12 and when he passed away in 2007 I always wanted to do something with birds in memory of him.
So I am going to do a few puppet tests with owls to explore their characteristics and just in general I wanted to build a new puppet to play with :D But I am hoping with this exploration that a story will follow while I am just having some fun playing around.

I also chose the barn owl as it has the best reference footage I can find. I would like to do my own but I don't think we will have many in the middle of the city ;)

So here is my concept piece, more of a colour script I suppose

--Please click the thumbnails to view them bigger--

And here is just a play around trying to familiar with drawing the barn owl

Some closer shots of them individually