Taken from "Spotlight on Elwing the White" by Maggie Percival. Published in The Mantle issue 1, January 1996.

By far the most challenging aspect of this costume was the wings.  I wanted to be able to move well in this costume, and in particular to move like a bird; that, of course, included the wings.  The first stage was to study the anatomy of a bird and in particular the wing structure.

The most important thing I had to consider was that the wingspan of a bird (ie. measurement from wing tip to wing tip) is at least double the length of the bird from beak to end of tail.  This meant that the costume was going to have a wingspan somewhere in the region of three metres.  My measure-ment from finger tip to finger tip is approx-imately 1.5 metres; in other words I was going to need the wings to extend beyond each hand by nearly three quarters of a metre, and I wanted to be able to move them in a bird like fashion.  A close look at the structure of a bird's wing is shown on the left. This had to be translated into a practical design for the costume and the only way to work it out was to make a much reduced version out of thin card that I could scale up when I felt I had got it correct.  This was the result:-

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