I just finished pressing the first sculpture in the new mold, with the fan playing across the back on low to start drying the clay from the back and inside, in an hour or two she should be firmed up enough to remove from the mold. It took about 30# of clay to make.

Since I had a gallon of mold rubber left sitting around I decided to use it to make a rubber positive of my angel panel. Poured it in some 6 hours ago and now I have my rubber positive ready to go. Probably Friday afternoon I’ll work on the plaster piece mold of this so I can make them in pressed fired terracotta too. With the mold finished, I will be able to start pressing some terracotta soon!

Shipping out my nurse roundel to a repeat client Mon or Tues who is giving it as a gift to a friend of his who is a nurse and refused promotions to remain a nurse! This is a densite plaster cast from a mold made from my clay original model which was based on an extant architectural sculpture on the facade of the former St Vincent’s Hospital nurses’ residence building in NYC. The cast was given a colored tint, and then with my multi-step finishing process and techniques it was made to look just like these sculptures do on 125 year old building facades in the city. This will be…

I made 3 videos today, all time-lapse. Removing the mold; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kM76pxapco Cleaning up the architectural pressed clay terracotta grotesque sculpture; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W_GAQQHbms Pressing a terracotta architectural owl panel sculpture; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCtUqqZB-tY

Last week I fired these 3 sculptures that were dry enough, they all came out fine, the slight bit of yellow tint is some artifact in the photo under LED lighting, these are brick red and there’s no yellowish tint on them. I think I will press another 294 keystone, another owl, and another 285 grotesque this weekend and then I’ll have enough for a couple of full kiln loads in about 3 weeks.

The first pressed owl is done, it took 30# of clay

Now you see it, now you don’t, 100 year old church demolished in Brooklyn, no one even bothered to save those hand carved stone Corinthian capitals, the arrow points to one that had crashed down and was laying in the rubble mostly intact, all of them hand carved on site. Nobody cared enough to even bother saving them. LikeShow more reactions Comment

A previous client contacted me out of the blue tonight, I remembered her right away when she mentioned Ontario Canada since I’ve only shipped to one client in Ontario. I forgot exactly what I sent her, but they were all concrete for her building facade, so a Google street refreshed my memory- 3 queen frieze fragments, 2 acanthus leaves and 2 griffin panels! The griffin panels can be seen under the two windows, one the 3 queens can be seen on top of a column of stones in the 2nd photo, and an acanthus leaf in the 3rd photo. One of the views is from 2009 so it’s been a…

Opened the kiln a little while ago and all the pieces came out perfect, one cherub shown was from a previous firing, a lion block was in this load not shown in the photo. The beaver is already sold to a client, and the 2 cherubs will get stained.  

After I finished adjusting and gluing on the wood grille pieces onto my dry clay model I hit the whole thing with primer so I can see how it looks without the distraction of variances in color. I’m thinking casts of this will look best in a flat or satin battleship grey like the original 1920s elevated highway this depicts was, maybe some aging/rust streaks on the grey would be even better. I wish I had used less course clay as I had problems getting finer detailing without runing into “courseness” but it is what it is, and if I had gotten perfectly smooth fine details and lines it would…