Sculpture and St. Francis

The rubber mold used for casting the sculpture.

I've been busy getting this carving ready for the Yard, Garden, Patio Show Feb 18-22 at the Oregon Convention Center. My sculpture will be featured in the Association of Northwest Landscape Designer's booth.

You soon learn in sculpture (and hopefully in life?) that you can't do everything well.
In fact life gets much easier the sooner you can job things out. Specialists don't have that steep learning/remembering curve because they do that specific work daily. They make your work and you look good.

Brian Hering at Design Form made a custom shaped box-mother that allows the cast to be turned over and demolded in one step. It's brilliantly simple because it saves so much effort.

For the welded support stand I went to Howser Steel. Many thanks to metalsmith Larry Kitchens who helped design it and then fabricated the steel  frame.

Cast stone is a fancy name for concrete.
Concrete is grey.
A really dead grey.

So we begin the acid test. Literally. I used Dura-Stain concrete chemical acid stain. It comes in 9 different colors, I used Oak (tan) and Western Brown (a medium chocolate) brown. It gives a nicely mottled surface. (That means I'm still learning how to control it.)

The finished artwork installed in the next post.