The model is set up now to make the mold tomorrow  

I now have the modelling finished on this master clay model, once it dries a bit I’ll be going over the surface and cleaning it up more. Once it’s dry the first mold will be made and then I’ll be combining 3 plaster casts of this to make one larger panel shape, then two molds will be made of that- one for casting interior cast-stone and the other for pressing clay for the terracotta version.  

I have to finish the lower 1/3rd of this yet, I hope to get it done this weekend, but it is progressing nicely and I’m excited about seeing the eventual pressed terracotta version using 3 of these together to form a repeated design panel. On the left is an original 1930 bronze from the Women’s House of Detention, 6th Ave, Greenwich Village,  NYC demolished 1973.

  NOTE: This post never made it to the blog originally, it sat in cueue a long time, this model was finished a good year ago. Here’s today’s model progress, mostly working on the right half: The major modelling is now finished and he’s hollowed out, soon as the clay gets drier I will be cleaning up the surfaces and details. Side view

Now that the clay is just about right for working with it I did some refining and cleanup on the upper 2/3rds of the model today. I’ll be doing work on the lower 1/3rd tomorrow. The “window” of workability of the clay is fairly short once it reaches this point of firming up, made shorter too by the fact there isn’t a lot of mass in this relatively small model and the humidity in the house is very low. Even wrapped in plastic and kept sprayed periodically with water it still progresses towards dry so I need to finish this up more or less by next weekend.  

I hollowed out the back of the model today which will help let the clay start to firm up a bit, I also did a little minor work on it as well. The sculptor has to work around and with the materials and the “mood” of the materials, clay definitely has a “Mood” that depends on the humidity in the room, how moist the clay is, how thick the clay piece is and what is being made with it. When the clay is fresh it’s very pliable and soft, it can also be sticky which makes using tools difficult as the clay wants to stick to the tool. I usually…

I cut out a template tool to use to shape the convex holes on the left strip so they are all the same curvature and size, of course they all need cleaning up and refining, but that has to wait for the clay to get firmer as the moisture dries out of it. Right now the clay is still very soft and will be until I hollow out the back.

Here’s my clay model just started with the larger scaled design applied to the surface using a ruler, square and compass. The original nickel plated bronze artifact to the left being used to resize the model is from the Women’s House of Detention at 10 Greenwich Ave, NYC which was designed by Sloan and Robertson in 1931. The connected courthouse was the scene of the notorious Harry K Thaw murder trial of renowned architect Stanford White in 1906. I rescued several of the individual bronze pieces from the jail when it was being demolished in 1973, I was 13 at the time and even then recognized their importance. My clay…

Now I have the size for the clay model calculated out to allow for the moist to dry shrinkage of the clay model (5%) plus the eventual 10% shrinkage involved with the hand-pressed clay version with it’s drying and kiln firing. Added to these two factors is an additional amount to make the resulting fired clay pressing close to the fired size of the Nortown D5 panel- 18-3/4″ x 12-3/4″ With that calculated out and plotted out on paper I have both my full scale reference print-out and the box-form required to start the model after a little more prep-work. I’ll be making one section of the repeated design, making…

Now I have the 3rd fired panel out of the kiln, I had lowered the final temperature 10º to 2050º and the end “hold” time from 10 minutes to 5 minutes. Also, I placed several kiln posts on the floor of the kiln so the panel could set on top of them on end and be raised about 1″ off the kiln floor and still allow the kiln lid to close. It looks like this solved both issues I had, one was the red color I wanted had started turning towards the more brown spectrum for this clay at the 2060-2079º temperatures, so lowering the temperature to 2050 solved that,…