Hello! Here is a sculpture I created last Fall. The assignment was to find a poem and create a bronze rendition of it, so here is what I made.
The Moment by Margaret Atwood
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
Here is the process if you're interested.
First, I got a many pieces of wax and used a torch gun and carving tools to create the piece out of wax. After I was happy with my result, I had to use thick wax rods and a wax cup with no bottom and adhere the piece on top of this wax cup. The piece then looked like a little trophy! I proceeded with a process that requires a mixture called slurry. Everyone makes slurry differently and I'm not sure what my school used. So I had to dip the piece in slurry, then in fine sand, let it dry (about 8 hours), then repeat the process four more times or until I had a thick layer about an inch thick. Then i repeated the process twice more except with coarse sand and slurry. After that, there was a hard plaster coat around the piece. At this point, I had to cut an inch off the bottom which held the wax cup, and use heat to melt all of the wax from the inside of the mold I made using slurry. Then my professors poured hot bronze into the mold and let it cool! Finally, the fun part. Once the metal is inside the mold, we use a chisel and hammer to lightly chip away the rest of the mold, until nothing remains but the bronze piece and the bronze cup at the bottom. Then we saw off the cup and small wax rods holding the piece to the cup, sand it down nice and pretty! Unfortunately, it's difficult to fix smaller details without risking the rest of the piece so there are a few bubbles on my sculpture, but I'm really proud of it regardless. I have my initials carved in along with the bark texture but it is only visible if you look for it!
Edit: I forgot to mention-- after your piece is chiseled out, there may be extra tiny pieces of sand within the smaller notches or cracks. I sandblasted my piece (which is a device that shoots tiny pieces of sand and air at an intense rate to push extra plaster from those cracks. So when that's all done and there is no more sand on my piece, I painted mine with a slight black tint using a huge torch to heat up my piece and some black patina (paint for metal). I brushed the patina all over my piece and used steel wool when the sculpture cooled to get the look I wanted, and then I went back to the torch and brushed a special type of wax finish to seal everything!
THE END!