Thursday, September 11, 2008

Picking up Iron Horn - Monumental Sized

Today, with the help of my apprentice, Julie Burt, I traveled to the foundry to pick up the computer scaled up foam version of the bronze, Iron Horn http://www.bronzesbylemon.com/indians_Iron-Horn.html .
A wax was made of the small version of Iron Horn and sent to a place where they scan the figure into a computer and then, depending on the size, they scaled it up to a six foot figure and then cut it out of foam using lasers. The bigger the less detail comes out. I was amazed at how much detail actually did come out in the foam. The following are photo's taken at Northwest Art castings today as we picked up the finished foam figure.
Julie holds the gun in the first photo. Scott, the owner of Northwest Art Castings in the checkered shirt and I go over the mounting of the foam to the wood platform, with the support needed to hold up the weight of the clay, once it's put onto the foam.









As you can see in the second to the last photo, the foam was loaded into the back of my truck for the trip back to the studio. The full figure probably weighed less than 6 pounds. It's totally amazing to see in person. Julie and I will start putting clay on this piece as soon as we receive the 150 pounds of clay it will take to finish it up. The detail is less, like I said, in this size, so I will have to redo the face a bit and will correct things that don't translate well when you increase the size of a small piece.
What really surprised me was the fact that it was perfectly proportioned. I work very hard to get these measurements right and it really paid off in the final point up.
Well I'll be back in the Otter Banks for Friday and Saturday working on Ain't No Cowboy.