Bronze Project

This spring semester I am in Sculpture 1

and my first project was Bronze casting.

I spent about a month working on it and it was so much fun.

I'll go through all the steps of bronze casting.

The first step is to start sculpting a piece of wax.

You can has much detail as you want.

The wax is very easy to mold.

Wax sprews will be added to the sculpture to form a funnel and air vents.

The second step is to prepare a plaster mixture

that will be poured over the wax form to make a mold.

Once the plaster has set, the wax must be burnt out.

After the wax is emptied from the mold,

bronze can be poured in through the funnel.

Here is the mold with bronze cooling inside.

After the bronze has cooled, the mold can be crack open with a hammer

and the sculpture can be removed.

You have to power wash all the plaster off your sculpture

and out of the cracks.

Then you can begin the cleaning up process.

This includes cutting off all the sprews, cutting away impurities, sanding and polishing.

Here my sprews have been removed.

Patinas can be added to the bronze to give it a colored finished look.

Here the rabbit has a little bit of a brown patina.

I also made a wood base to hold my sculpture

and added a slight green patina to the turtle shell.

My turtle TJ is often the subject matter in my art work

because he is so easy to observe and study.

This piece was inspired by the Tortoise and the Hare fable.

I love how a short story like a fable can teach simple life lessons that everyone can benefit from.

What I take from the Tortoise and the Hare is that even though they are very different creatures, they are still running the same race.

Each one made different choices while running the race and it determined the outcome of the race.

Every person in the world is unique but we still all have goals in our life.

We all need to be aware of the choices we make and how they will affect our lives.