Fun with feathers (Patreon)

Waiting for Trico's fur glue to dry, I decided to start trimming the quills off the feathers. They add a lot of bulk and generally get in the way, so they need to go so I can easily lay them neatly. 

I actually think I might have way more feathers than I need, the bag has a deceivingly large amount inside. That's actually awesome, since I don't want to spend any more money on this project if it can be helped haha. 

The feathers are all a fair bit smaller than those I received in the swatch batch I ordered. They must have some variation between batches. I'm pretty happy they are smaller tbh, since they will be more to scale with Trico. 

I need to colour the feathers in different shades of grey. Not sure if I should buy some dye, or do it via airbrush. Trico's feathers do have a sort of halo pattern to them, so if I do it that way they will be more accurate, but I assume it will take longer. Anyone have experience dyeing feathers? I imagine it can't be too hard w/ some natural fiber dye. Might be easier to match bulk lots. 

I wish I could just airbrush them when they are glued to his body, but they will all be overlapping each other. I figure that if any of the feathers are moved after the airbrushing they would show gabs/lots of masked off areas where they were blocked by overlapping.