I’ve had some great bird wings and horns from different animals. I’ve used them in different paintings as reference and just held them (or had my patient wife hold them which was a sacrifice because they are a bit gross…).

I have wanted to find a good solution to hold them and be able to rotate and turn them easily. I finally came up with something and wanted to share because this would work well for not just wings and horns (ha!) but anything that would fit into the clamps and not be too heavy for the tripod.

Check this out!

There are 4 parts, minus the tripod.

  • (2) Small Rig Super Clamps top – with
  • (2) Small Rig Magic Arm Double Ball Heads middle –
  • mounted onto an 8″ dual mount bar bottom – which mounts onto a standard tripod mount.
  • Under the bottom of the bar, you can see (2) 1/4″ 20 wingnuts. You’ll need these as well to tighten each clamp assembly onto the bar. I was able to build it out for about $37. That doesn’t include the tripod of course.

This lets me hold one or two things and position them in just about any way I wish! This is really handy. I can see using it for flowers, cloth, maquettes, wings, bones, horns and other dead stuff… anything I need held at an angle or a pair of things. You could get a quad setup too if you had such a need. But that’s madness!

Here is a video showing how you can position the clamps and removing the wings

If you want to build something yourself, here is the list of parts!

Small Rig SuperClamps and Double Ballhead 2 pack
Dual Mount Bar
Wingnuts

And this is the tripod I used:
Tripod

As bonus, I use the Super Clamps all around my studio. I used them to hold cameras as well as my phone. If you want a way to mount your phone on your easel and position it just were you’d like it, get a longer articulating arm like this one: SmallRig Arm Cool Ballhead Arm Super Clamp 

And a solid phone holder like this one, Alanzi Aluminum Phone Tripod Mount – and you can get your phone in just the right place when painting indoors or outside.

I like this because I don’t have to set my gear down to see and respond to a text if I need to.

There’s my nerdy gear post for the month!

Thank you,

Howard