After another 3-4 hours work this evening I came to the last square inch on this model and now it’s finished! There will be a little more final cleaning up on it to do yet as it dries out. The clay is Continental course red clay with grog.  

I finally got back to this after letting it sit a while, it’s now kind of leather hard so I need to get the finishing done quickly. All the work I did today was on just the winged lion, hopefully tomorrow I can finish his front paws and get a substantial amount done on the other half.

In this video I show the new wolf head mold and how it works,  but I also show a soon to be discarded mold of the other material I used to use and anyone can see how easily it tears like paper even when it’s a good 1/4″ thick. I only got 16 casts out of the first wolf head mold before the section in and around the mouth tore badly enough it was unusable. Mold video And in this one I show the current model in progress “Roman Ruins”   Roman Ruins

Just finished pouring the 5th section- the base for this mold and it can come apart in a half hour or hour. It took a box 16″ square and 5-1/4″ deep to fill it high enough to cover his nose by about one inch. I also ordered some slip to try out, it was a real pain trying to find what I wanted, and then when I did, I found they can’t ship those 2 gallon boxes via UPS. A couple of places can ship one gallon slip containers but one place had a $26 price plus UPS for one gallon. As I know it took one gallon of rubber…

I haven’t worked on this much this last week as I’m on vacation from work, and I also spent a couple or three days repointing the brickwork on my gallery building, but it’s making progress. The puttis’ hands were not easy, I worked on those  and his face yesterday, and today mostly two of the lion’s paws that were only roughed out.

I finally had time this week to set about repointing the brick on my gallery building, the weather was just perfect, warm, nice breeze, low humidity and sunny. I had to rust treat the exposed steel I beam flange, prime and paint it first, then I began work on the mortar repointing. It’s just another of those periodic kinds of maintenance things I have to stop work on other projects to do. Most of the facade is good, it was just a couple of courses of brick all the way across where the mortar was like sugar an inch in, obviously that had been repointed very poorly. After I finished repointing…

This coming Saturday and Sunday the 29th and 30th of June will be the first time my physical gallery-museum building is open to the general public. It still needs more work done but progress is being made. I am officially on vacation to Monday July 9th. The winged lion and putti model I haven’t had time to work on  the last couple of days, and it needs to firm up a bit more anyway. I submitted materials and the fee to the National Sculpture Society so I can have my work displayed in their sculptor’s gallery on the NSS web site:  http://www.nationalsculpture.org Founded in 1893 in part by sculptor Augustus…

Progress for today so far.

I started the model this afternoon and after forming the flat slab, no tools have been used yet to this stage, just fingertips and fingernails. I have to wait on a couple of details which will likely be placed temporarily and then replaced when the model is alomst done- the lion’s horn and the putto’s arm, both of which extend out to full round and would dry out too quickly if done at this point. The lion’s outward legs are also full round but have a little more mass to them, they are attached but undercut deeply, they may be changed a little or just undercut more. The lion’s chest…