There has been a family of green woodpeckers in the horse fields over the summer so it was natural for me to try and make one. As with all smaller creatures it is actually quite tricky to make one in welded found objects. Luckily a green woodpecker is quite a characteristic shape.

I don’t often use colour in my sculptures but I had a few red items out in my workshop from making a red squirrel so I had a red combine ‘finger’ and a red canterbury hoe to hand. It helped to confirm the species and I think it works well in this sculpture.

The beak is the make or break of any sculpture of a bird. I had to trawl through my collection of scissors to find just the right sizes for this. Parts of the handles helped with the head and the flanks. One pair even had red handles so I could use them in the head as well.

The blades from larger scissors all went into the tails and wings. The lovely shape of the tail, which has very stiff feathers to help the bird balance when clinging to trees, is all scissor blades other than the central feather which is a very old plumb line weight.

This piece will be for sale at The Natural Eye, the annual exhibition of the Society of Wildlife Artists at Mall Galleries London. The show runs from Thursday October 30th until Sunday 9th November 2014.