MEDIA ARTS: My Sculptris Animal!

So I've got two versions of my Sculptris: #1 is just the regular hummingbird clay sculpture at a flower, and number two I applied a motion blur and duplicated my hummingbird's wings a few times to imitate the way a hummingbird's wings blur because they flap them so fast. I don't know which one you'd like to mark, so I put them both up. I figure you can look at the blurred wings one for overall picture and if you want to zoom in on the wings when they are not blurred this is the one.

And since I wasn't here on Friday I wasn't exactly positive if I needed to put up these pictures I took originally...but it can't hurt. If there's anything else I should post tell me.

Reflection Questions:

1. What aspect of your image do you find most successful and why?

I really am quite proud of how the wings turned out. I had no idea how I was going to make wings out of Sculptris because it had given me a lot of trouble trying to sculpt talons out of a ball of clay (and I ended up just not making talons and Photoshopping them in later). I didn't have much luck flattening out things at all, and what is flatter than a feather? But I discovered that if you invert the 'draw' option it works much better than flatten and I got the wings to be the thickness I wanted.  I also was happy with how the 'grab' option pulled the wings and the beak out of my bird's body.
But as for the painting job, I couldn't believe how much more realistic my bird looked after I painted the ruby throat on it! So that was my favourite aspect of my bird for my painting job.

2. What aspect of your image do you find least successful and why?

I wasn't entirely happy with my bird's tail, because it is very thick (but any thinner and it looked ridiculously flat!) and looks like an odd continuation of my bird's body. I couldn't seem to get a proper picture of a hummingbird from the back without its tail feathers spread out, and, as my hummingbird's tail feathers were not spread out it made it difficult to get any sort of realistic texture on it.
The other thing that I fiddled with a lot before settling for the best look rather than the 'perfect' look was my bird's eyelids. I could not make the eyelids go up over the bird's eyes for the life of me! Instead it sort of sits a bit above the eye and sticks out. I had trouble smoothing it down so that it would sit on the eye more because whenever I used the smoothing or grabbing options they would warp my eyeball or flatten it out. Most of the angles my bird is viewed at (before it was painted) it looked angry because of its eyelids.

3. If you could do this project again, what changes would you make to improve it?

I would probably make the wings angled outwards a bit more instead of straight back because from a head-on angle and if viewed from the back it looks rather strange. I would also make my hummingbird's tail feathers spread outwards so that I could put a better texture on them and then they would (hopefully) look more realistic.
I hope to figure out a technique to make my bird look more like it's a part of the background, because if you know where I made the bird it is easy to see that it is not naturally a part of the picture. If I figure out/learn how to do such a thing that would definitely be another change I would make to it.