At first I was going to leave the convex molding plain, but as it progressed, the plain convex molding and shape was starting to resemble a car tire, with a fancy hub cap to me, so I decided it really needed the egg & dart. Looking at the original, it is not a random repeat design as it might seem, it has an even 16 repeats of the egg & dart pattern. it became clear they placed an “egg” at exactly the 12, 3, 6, and 9 o’clock positions, leaving 2 repeats between each, so it was easy enough to find the four main points 12, 3, 6, 9, and…

After roughing out a face and shoulders onto the roundel I hoisted it up on my work bench easel so I can work on it better. Models like this make me overjoyed I installed a half-ton chain hoist in the ceiling of my studio when I built it 🙂 It’s diameter is a little larger than the wolf and lioness roundels were – from which I kept their shaping templates. One of the pieces of the template system included a curved cleat screwed to the modelling board to keep the model from sliding down the board from it’s own weight, but that jig is too small and it’s curvature doesn’t…

I decided to do the nurse roundel next, the original roundel is one of I believe two over the entrances of what was the St Vincent hospital student nurses’ residence building in Greenwich Village. Some time back the 758 bed main hospital building was demolished, it featured an ornate chapel with stained glass windows. The neo-Baroque chapel, opened in 1889, served as a refuge for survivors of major catastrophes, including the sinking of the Titanic, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the AIDS epidemic and the September 11 attacks. http://www.wnyc.org/i/620/372/c/80/photologue/photos/stvincent1.jpg The Catholic-charity-run St. Vincent’s Hospital is under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s fraud unit, which is probing whether honchos purposely…

On the 1927 Greybar building near Grand Central Station on 42nd Street there’s a large canopy over the entrance, one interesting and odd decoration are the Art Deco styled rats climbing up the supports for the canopy; Besides the rats, if you notice at about the one o’clock position above the rat there’s a rosette where the adjacent support enters the wall, but if you look closely you can see this rosette isn’t a typical rosette flower at all, it’s actually a rosette made up of eight rat heads arranged in a uniform geometric circle! A pretty clever and interesting little design, the rats and the cones are representative of…

Now I finished hollowing the model out and after I finished that he is laid flat again on some strips of wood to let air circulate to the interior while it’s under loose plastic cover. He has shrunk 1/2″ in length now from 19″ to 18-1/2″ while the work has been going on. He also has a model number which is 308. (update July 2015: AFter firing to 2050º the sculpture is now 16-1/2″ tall, a total of  2-1/2″ down from the original wood form size.) I hope to do the final cleaning up on the surfaces in the next couple of days and then move onto the next model,…

I took all of the pieces out of the kiln this morning, here’s a couple of the lion blocks nr. 1265 which turned out great; The other pieces had some wierd issue I have to find out the cause of, meanwhile I came up with both a weight and size loss chart for the 3 lions; #1 dry weight: 7.80# #2 dry weight: 8.00# #3 dry weight: 8.05# Original model size as molded: 10″ x 4-1/4″ ( 25.4cm x 10.8cm ) Pressed clay dry weight size: Length/height: 9-1/2″ ( 24.2cm ) Width: 4-3/8 ( 11.0cm ) Fired weights: #1: 7.00# #2: 7.30# #3: 7.40# Fired size: Length/Height: 8-15/16″ ( 22.7cm…

After drying 3 of the larger lions Nr.1265, and 4 of the Art Deco 8A sculptures in the oven @ 150-170 degrees F for 7 hours, I placed all of them in the kiln around 6 pm with the revised user 6 program. They will sit in the kiln @ 195 degrees for 8 hours which takes about 2 hours for the kiln to reach. With that schedule the kiln should shut off tomorrow night around 8:45 pm after firing for 26 hours 45 minutes. I should be able to see what I have on sunday morning.

I have added a terracotta version of the single section Art Deco now. This is an exciting development of expanding into this new line of top quality durable kiln fired terracotta. Each hand pressed cast must be carefully dried over about two-three weeks, and hand detailed just as they did in the 1890s, of course production is much slower, and the hand labor is considerably more than the interior cast stone is, this will be reflected in the terracotta line’s price. A number of my other smaller models are planned to be introduced in this material as well. Each of these terracotta sculptures are personally signed, numbered and dated works…

I did more work today on the eyes, eyebrows, cheeks and hair, I’m just now starting to like where it’s going.

I decided that since this model is so deep and heavy, I would rough hollow the back out, so I got it off the easel and standing vertically on the work bench so I could unscrew the backer board to access the inside. I probably took out about 35# of clay from the back, it was a bag and a half worth. With it being lighter I screwed the backer board back on and then laid him down flat so I could unscrew the bottom board to give the bottom a curvature. Once that was done I screwed the bottom board back on so it keeps the side baords stable…