Bronze casting!

The steps as I know them:

First you need something that you want to spent hundreds of dollars creating in bronze. I chose this person-in-bear sculpture that will be a part of a series to be completed over the summer.

The second step is to come up with a wax positive; A positive being an object to take a mold from. It’s called a positive because when you take a mold you’re capturing the negative space, like a film negative only 3D. That’s how it was explained to me.. anyways, that’s a positive, and you need one to get to step three.

You can either make something out of any material and take a mold from that and then cast it in wax, or you can make your first positive out of wax to begin with. I happen to love wax as a medium, it’s really strong but really easy to carve/model. It is very toxic when melted however, you can tell if you’ve been breathing the fumes. It’s gross. But it’s still great for sculpture making if ventilation isn’t a problem.

Once you have a wax positive you attach it to a long metal rod via sprueing. The long metal rod becomes the main pathway for your molten bronze once you’ve coated this whole thing with ceramic shell.

1. Metal rod coated with wax

2. Vent sprues

3. (2 sprues 1) Cup

4. More vent sprues (I meant to point that arrow at the non-vent sprues)

4. Non-vent sprues are at the bottom

5. Positive

The ceramic shell we used is a special kind of ceramic that has post-fired ceramic ground dust mixed into regular clay so it can withstand the temperature of the bronze. This part of the process is the first time that the entire thing can fall apart. The sprues need to be carefully placed and fixed in place or the weight of the positive with all the ceramic gunk on it will snap them and break your heart. Especially painful if you made the first positive in wax.

Once you have your ceramic mold back from wherever, the factory in my case, you’re close to being done. Just melt out the wax and fill it with bronze. For me there is very little control in this stage, I’m not strong enough to pour the bronze. There are a ton of things that can go wrong, including a hole busting open in the side of your mold, ruining the positive you spent months on and spilling expensive bronze all over the floor. Luckily that didn’t happen! Yeah!

Video of casting here

Removing the shell takes a while depending on how intricate your positive was. Took me 5-10 hours of chiselling and sandblasting which is not very much time at all actually, comparatively.

Clean-up and Patina! Removing the sprues uses a combination of zip-disk, cold-chisel, files, sand-blasting. The patina is a chemical you burn on that works like a paint and I believe also prevents oxidization, but I’m not sure on that part. I haven’t gotten to the patina yet.

And that's what I've been doing for the last three months!

Ben: Can you please drain the bath tub?
Me: I want to put the water into that jug.
Ben: Why.
Me: Because I can water the plants with it.
Ben: *moment of visible, extreme cognitive difficulty* Do.. whatever you want.

Illustration for an editorial on the Olympics

I'm not into sports but that was a damn fine show, from what I had time to see. It's nice to be a little patriotic once and a while :D

Here's some concept stuff for work I'm doing.



People living inside bears! Doing a small bronze first and then big ones! Big sculptures, not big bronzes. Goodness no.

The top one, they're doing sign language, and then the other one they are both eating berries. You can beaaaaaaaaarly wait to see more! Huh? Huh? ;D

Wasn't he nice? Didn't he seem like a grandpa? I was missing him the other day so I drew him and read his Wikipedia page. Stephen Harper has lizard eyes and is not a good actor.

Getting up in the morning is bullshit. Unless you have good reason to put up with the sun being up for hours and hours, reflecting off your computer screen, makin you squint. All the people running around out there. Bullshit. Tomorrow I have a job interview at 9:30.

I made a painting of Christmas unicorns for my friend but I can't make it go into the computer yet, will not fit through holes.

Tomorrow maybe.

I'm entering a competition. If I win I'll be spending the next 6 months making this:



We had to make these "photomontages" to enter as part of the proposal package. It's probably not a weird name for photoshopping your model into the intended site, but every time some one has said photomontage to me over the past week all I hear is "Even Rocky had a montage, montage!"

"Do you have an upskirt photo as your desktop?" - Science editor at the Manitoban

It's usually covered with open windows so I forget when I have something offensive as my wallpaper. Not earlier though! Good first impression to make at the newspaper I'm working at. It was pretty funny.

I made this picture today at work! More tigers. I made another one that 2/3 people surveyed thought was a hippo. It was not supposed to look like a hippo. My friend/boss liked it though! It's a really awesome part time job thing so far, I love that I draw at work and it's not because I have nothing to do. I just noticed that drawing has a line at the bottom. Darn. DARN IT. IT'S RUINED. IT'S RUINED. I think it will be okay.

Ben is home today and we are having supper at a reasonable hour, and are going to watch Battlestar Galactica, which is going to put me in a really good mood. Unless it makes me cry again, that show is intense.

Messing around on photoshop, the original is just black ink on white paper. I secretly want to be Robert Bateman. God, fuck, I just love animals so fucking much, shit.



It's been a very nice Sunday. I coloured that tiger drawing after finishing up a graphic for the Manitoban (student newspaper), it's cold outside so I can wear thick socks (which I like to do), and I hit 80 on my second Warcraft character. I got this blog up, which I've been meaning to do for while, and now I'm going to read this magazine which I only purchased because it has an interview with Brad Neely in it. Blog, christened! Champagne, in it's eye.