At this point in the lost wax casting process, the wax mold has been formed and refined, and now it's time to move toward the final creation: a bronze sculpture. - After the details in the wax mold have been resculpted, it's dipped in a ceramic material.
- The form is heated until the wax melts and the ceramic is fired.
- The ceramic mold is heated in a crucible until it reaches the temperature of melted bronze (figure A).
- Melted bronze is poured into the heated ceramic mold (figure B).
- The form is allowed to cool, and then the ceramic mold is broken off the finished bronze piece.
- Because bronze is very rough, the surface must be smoothed with power tools.
Sculptor Sandy Decker, the owner of Decker Studios, gives host Tracy Griffith a crash course in patina application (figure C), a chemical process that speeds up the natural darkening of bronze. Web extra: More on sculpting with David Carradine When did you first begin sculpting?
My parents took me to see Fantasia when it opened. And I got the book. And there was always this clay around. And so what I did was I sculpted all the dinosaurs and put them on the windowsill in descending order of size up to the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Did you sculpt a lot as a child?
I always had a ball of plastaline in my pocket. When I went to school I'd sit there and instead of taking notes I'd make stuff. I always had a piece of clay in my pocket. Did you go to school for the arts?
My great uncle was a very important painter -- Will Foster. I studied with him a little bit when I was a kid. And then I studied music very formally at the San Francisco State College of Theory and Composition. I was going to write operas. Where does all this creativity come from?
I think you're born with it. I think you make a choice: "This is what I'll do." But I think anybody that's got this creative drive could go any one of these ways. I mean you take a look at contemporary art, and it's all inspiration. Have you even sold any of your work?
There was one period when I was 22 or 23 when I actually sold some paintings. I was trying to do like a commercial thing. And I would sell these paintings for 50 bucks apiece and color-code them to people's houses. I didn't care for that. Painting on commission is not fun. You hardly have any of your early works. Where are they?
I had a little house in the Hollywood Hills full of my work. One day I just decided, I'm out of here. And I took my Indian blanket and threw everything in it that I could get in it and hung my guitar over my shoulder and walked out and dumped the blanket into the passenger seat of my little two-seater sports car and drove away. And I did that twice. So that's what happened to some stuff.
RESOURCES :
Sculpting in Clay
Model: 0764301136
Author: Dale Power
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