Bronze Casting

Not that I haven't been doing anything lately, more because I have been quite busy and not wanting to post about every fart I let. I decided to try and go to a weekly update. The past few weeks I have been working on a bronze sculpture. For this I used an scaled up (slightly larger than the original) Jaguar sign and made a rubber mold out of it. This means that I can duplicate it with a wax model which I can then use to make into another mold to cast it in bronze (or hopefully later in this course into glass).
Even though the emblem looks very neat and simple, making a mold out of it took a bit more than I expected. First of all the arms are undercuts, but because the rubber is so flexible I was able to get away with it. Another point I really want to mention is that a lot of people think that bronze casting is expensive because of the material. Well I can assure you the bronze is actually one of the cheaper parts of the process. Once you have your wax model you have to get rid of the mold lines and ad a pour cup (this is where you will pour in the bronze later on), as well as the feeding lines and the air vents.problem with these is that once you have it in bronze all of these will have become bronze as well and you need to remove them trying not to mess up your sculpture.
So you can guess this is a very time consuming process (which is why I have been working on this one for over a week now). After you cleared the whole thing up and sand blasted it, you can color it bu using patina (different chemicals which will give off different reactions and thus colors). This is where I am now and I feel really satisfied with my result.
All that I have to do now is coming up with a nice foot for the piece and send it of to my dad. None of which I will do right away since I have a lot of other stuff to as well. I will keep you all up to date with my projects and if you have any questions/remarks feel free to comment on my blog page.

Enjoy the pictures.