Zoey's ready for her mold

At last, another sculpture is ready for casting! Unfortunately, the Foundry in Tacoma has closed, but Ed, their master mold-maker is still taking in projects. He'll make the mold and then contract out the casting to a foundry in Portland and coordinate the chasing, patina etc. I'm delivering "Zoey" to him tomorrow. Here are a few images.

Update

Here are some new images of the reclining male figure that I posted earlier. He's almost ready to fire, but first I need to finish the hands, feet, ears and hollow him out.

Don't let this happen to you!

Yesterday, I discovered that a sculpture which had been almost ready for casting had spontaneously self destructed. Because I waited so long, and it had to be kept moist, the plywood base rotted and pulled apart. The sculpture separated from the feet and fell over. There are numerous breaks and the gluteal area is a total loss. Also, the ankles, feet and hands. The pose of the legs will have to be reset. Luckily, the piece was able to be re-mounted and the restoration can begin. The moral of the story is not to delay making the mold once you complete something, use longer screws to attach the flange to the base which should be waterproofed! Here are a few pics of the devastation.

New Drawings

Here are two drawings that I did recently at the Digipen open studio and the Gage Academy drawing jam. The first is in Sanguine chalk pencil with white highlights and the second is in olive-green Lyra pencil with chalk highlights. Both are on toned Canson paper.

Sneak Preview

Here are two low resolution phone snapshots of my current work in progress. It's a male reclining figure about 1/3 to 1/2 life size. Since he didn't require an armature, it will be possible to fire him in a kiln rather than cast him. This will be a lot less work and expense, but dangerous since there's always the possibility that the piece could break or even explode during the firing process. Hopefully, I'll be able to finish the sculpting with about six additional hours and then he'll have t0 be gradually dried to "leather hard" and hollowed out. Stay tuned!

Photos of the completed sculpture

Yma is home

On Friday, I finally made it down to the foundry to approve the metalwork and choose a patina. It was a bit nerve wracking to drive by the site of my near demise last week, but the car behaved very well. 

At the foundry, Danella, the artist in charge of the reassembly and chasing handed me a sharpie to note any areas for revision. After a few polishing touches, the sculpture was sandblasted again and taken to Steve the patinator. We discussed the various options and I chose a medium-dark version of a patina known as "French Brown". 

Steve bolted the piece onto a revolving stand,  heated it with a blow torch, and sprayed it with a coat of "liver of sulfur" or sulfurated potash. This turned it almost black. The next step was to rinse it with water, give it a quick blow dry and wipe back the darkness from the higher areas before massaging the whole thing with loose sand which gave it a nice burnished effect. In order to create  more depth and richness, we heated it again with an even larger blow torch and sprayed it with ferric nitrate which produced a warm red overtone. 

While the sculpture was still hot, Steve brushed it with wax. It would take another half hour for it to cool before the final coat of wax and buffing so I had a chance to witness a different piece being poured in the forge area before heading home. I'll post photos of the finished sculpture next week, in the meantime, enjoy the images from the final stage of the process!