With the original model completely dried out yesterday, I decided to go ahead and fire him in the kiln, so last night I programmed a new sequence with longer/slower heating rates, giving the model 9 hours @ 195º to make sure it’s good and dry all the way through, and then essentially rise about 75º an hour for a segment, and 80º for the last segment to 2046º which will make it 33-1/4 hours total. It’s a large heavy model so this should work fine. At the moment I have the dry green model in the kiln at the gallery cooking away. I just about fit in the kiln, it’s…

Now with the model finished, and the mold of him finished as well, here is the first cast of the lion:

Last shot for now, the clay will need to firm up somewhat before I do more to it, still pretty sticky and soft since I just opened the packages yesterday. It took exactly 100# of clay, I have about one softball sized piece left of the packages I opened for this model.

Now that I have the order of clay at hand that I purchased last week, I started my model of the Detroit Lee Plaza lion. So far after about 3-1/2 hours, I am at this point in my roughing out process:

Now mind you, I really like this ancient Roman carved stone frieze sculpture a lot, so I made my own.   While the few references to this have called it a “griffin” the head is not that of a bird as a griffin requires to be a griffin, but is more of the head of a lion. This is actually more properly called a winged lion (or lioness as it’s sans the mane) It is rich in symbolism, the interesting part is the winged figure is holding a vase and a plate, the vase is discharging a liquid which I will guess was probably meant to be wine. So the…

I started to set up to make a new model a couple of weeks ago and have my usual box form on the easel ready to fill with clay, but then I discovered the raku clay I have had sitting around was too stiff to really work well, and the one box of Continental Course Red clay I have is not enough. I went to Continental’s web site and was going to order just a couple of boxes, 100# worth but the UPS shipping charge shown was like $70 from Minneapolis to Iowa for about $30 worth of clay, so I closed the window and didn’t order it. Wow, the…

I decided on my size for the lion, which will be close to the size of the originals, I decided to go with 16-1/2 x 22 on the clay model, after shrinkage it will be around 15-1/2 by 21-1/2 or thereabouts. I scaled from photos and it appears the original lions were about 17 x 24, hard to get it much closer since the only photos I’ve found were taken at an angle, but one that helped a lot was the photo of the 24 stolen lions in the police storeroom, I could see a concrete block wall the lions were leaned up against, and since the blocks are a…

Here’s what the shattered panel I posted about that had damage in the kiln looks like, there’s so many tiny fragments that I determined in about 10 minutes of trying to see if it can be repaired to some extent that it’s beyond that LOL. If it was just a few large fragments it wouldn’t be hard to piece back together, but there’s a gallon pail full of dime sized chips and fragments too that are not shown. That’s ok though since I have a mold of it, still, it would have been nice to put back together, but with the amount of fragmentation, and then that wide crack- the…

I suppose I’ve been somewhat fascinated by these lions after reading an interesting story a decade ago about the theft of 50 of these from a fifteen story 1928 Art Deco building in Detroit that had been abandoned. Now I’m toying with the idea of making a model of one. The building, known as The Lee Plaza is on the historic register. The building closed in the late 1990s and the ground floor openings were bricked up with concrete blocks to keep vandals out, but the concrete blocks didn’t last long and soon the vandals and the scrappers made their way in and destroyed the interior, ripped out the wiring…

Oops, guess that panel didn’t work well, it was completely destroyed, turned out it was the raku clay and all the other models that had been fired were a different clay. The raku clay should have been better that the other clay since it’s designed for rapid heating and cooling. Oh well, no real loss since I have a mold of it, but it was a surprise it had started cracking and breaking before the kiln was even 700 degrees.