Henry the Tortoise

Check out Henry!  I have a few photos and made a mini-video of him so that you can see him from just about all the sides and angles.

First the skeleton, then the body, shaping, re-shaping, sculpting, re-sculpting, changing my mind as to what he should look like, pulling off head and re-sculpting again, finally, adding skin and texture to the turtle.

The second phase is to make a mold and a mother mold (to hold the rubber mold in place), which then will be used to cast the wax pieces from.

The third phase is to pull the waxes out of this mold and chase them out (get them ready for investing.)

After that the foundry will make an investment (another mold,) which will be used to melt the wax pieces out, leaving a negative; that's where the hot liquefied bronze will go and after cooling down it will become a solid metal piece again.

The next phase is to break up the investment, weld all the bronze pieces back together, clean it all up and put the texture back to where the weld marks are and polish the bronze out.

Finally, I put on a nice patina on the bronze sculpture and you will have a very awesome work of art.

Oh, and you may find this interesting... to make this sculpture, I needed the following materials:

Wood, a few screws, Styrofoam, hard foam, 200lb of clay...(That's almost 300lb of weight for the sculpture itself)

Then, lets add about 90lb of rubber for the mold, and approximately 500lb, or so, of plaster/reinforcement fiber mix),  40lb of wax plus a few other things, for a grand total of over 900lbs of STUFF for the process before the bronze...

...and onto the actual finished piece: 400 lbs of bronze...