How this way of enlarging your work by yourself could save you time, money and headaches!

I've re-made a few of my pieces in different sizes.
I didn't know how to do it, so I just muddled through with a calculator and a photocopier and lots of scraps of paper.

If I'd known about this other way of doing it I'd have saved myself a bunch of time and headaches.

I wish I'd known about this right from the get-go!

It's based on the notion that the ratio of enlargement of the overall height from your model to the intended enlargement, is the same for all the other measurements you can make.
Same for an arm, a head, a nose (even a very long nose), whatever.

Like most things useful I find out about, it's as old as the hills and I reckon I must be about the last person on earth to hear about it. I found this method in a book 'The Sculptor's Way' by Brenda Putnam, published by Dover.

Just in case I'm not the absolute last person to hear about it, here goes…

The long line at the bottom (AB) is as long as the height of the intended enlargement.
With some calipers, measure the height of your small piece. Put one end of the calipers at the far end of the long line (B), and make an arc.
The radius of the arc is the height of your small piece.
From the near end of the long line (A), make a longer diagonal line that just touches the arc.
This line is what you use to figure out your proportions.

Say you want to find out how long to make the leg of your enlargement.
Measure the small model's leg with calipers, and make an arc the same way you did at the end of the long line, but this time it will be closer to the near end, somewhere between A and B. So you slide one end of the calipers along the base line until you can make an arc that just touches the diagonal line.
The caliper will only be able to do this at one point on the base line, C.

The distance from point A to your caliper point on the base line 'C' is the length of the leg of the enlargement (AC).
And so on with all your other measurements.
I suppose you could even use string to measure circumferences (lay the string out and use it like it was any other measurement).
If you did that you might have to extend the lines beyond your original arc, if you're making something very fat.

Pretty neat huh?
All you need to do is make the original triangle type lines on a big bit of cardboard or something, and you're all set.
You need calipers that are small enough to measure off your small model and others big enough to use for your large one, but getting them is well worth it for the grief you'll be saved!

And even better, you can reverse the equation to reduce pieces.
The radius of the first arc is how big you want the piece reduced to, the base line is how big your original piece is.

Of course you still have to do all the actual work!
If money is no object but you're short on time, do what a lot of people do and get a digital enlargement in foam to serve as an armature and finish it off with clay!
I have never tried this, but if I had to make an enlargement that was really huge, say a life sized elephant for example, I think I'd go that route.

This is the largest of my Senior Moments at about 20" tall (I made four different sizes).

My website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
My Etsy store, CritterVille

New sculpture in the making: tree frogs on a vine

One tree frog has landed on the vine.
Soon there will be two more joining it.

I already know how and where the other two will land.
Can you guess?


My website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
My Etsy store, CritterVille.

Sprightly down under 2

Here's some pics of Sprightly's most recent trip down under...
Click HERE for last year's antipodean adventure where Sprightly comes face to face with the Sydney opera house.No trip down under is complete without a visit to the house with the best satellite TV reception in the world...


My website here, my Etsy store here.

Tiny turtle dilemma – the problems involved when producing miniature bronze turtle sculptures

There’s a great Seinfeld 2 part story called ‘the bottle deposit’ where Kramer and Newman are racking their brains to figure something out: Newman wants to take empty beer bottles to Michigan and deposit them for the extra five cents you get in that state.

Kramer tells him it’s impossible.
If they drive them there, the gas, toll booth and truck rental prices will kill them.
Newman’s determined to crunch the numbers every possible way to make it add up.

I have a similar dilemma with my tiny turtles.
Plenty of people have told me it’s not worth the hassle making tiny pieces. The work involved means you have to charge a lot, or you just don’t make any money on them.
Things with my tiny turtles seemed to be going well. But my supplier got fed up fiddling with them since his casting results were inconsistent. Sometimes they’d come out just fine, so he could give them to me after minimal metal finishing. If that happened every time things would still be great.

But the metal finishing is where he loses money since he gave me a per piece fixed price based on the assumption of consistently good casting results. But sometimes there’d be problems that would need extra time to fix (time is money), or he’d just ditch the problem ones and cast more. Again, wasted time and effort on his part. His prices were great for me, which is what I based my retail price on. But he’s had enough of making them.

So now I’m getting them made somewhere else, but it’s costing me more. They’re casting great, but the sprues the foundry puts on the bottom are bigger than my previous supplier’s, and they obliterate more of the under surface, including my initials.
So they need more work done after casting (after cutting off the bigger sprue, the bottom of the turtle needs to be metal worked, essentially re-sculpting that portion where the sprue was attached on each one), and that extra time adds to the bill.
I don’t want to raise the price on them, they’re 2 of my most affordable pieces.
I like that just about anyone who wants one can get one.



Here’s my options. Do I :-

Stop making them, it’s just too much trouble.
Drop the quality (just flatten off the bottom rather than have metal workers re-sculpt it) so I can still make a bit of money on them (they’d look fine except from underneath)?
Maintain the original quality but raise the price so I can still make a bit of money on them?
Maintain quality but keep the original price so I make next to nothing but you can still have one to enjoy at the same price as before, while I continue to explore other options?

I have decided to go with the last option:
Keep the same price, while trying to figure out a way to make it work.
At least for now.

Like Newman I’m hoping to find a successful ‘other option’ before too long and prove the nay sayers wrong!

They are available from me directly, from my Etsy store, and from some of the galleries I show in.

What's fine about fine art?

There's a gallery in town with bronze dogs by two different artists.
The gallery director (not the owner) told me one wouldn't rate as 'fine art' with her since they're just dogs being dogs, whereas the other she would describe as 'fine art' because it's not just being a dog, it's more arty and it has an idea.
I said for my money the dogs being dogs had character, personality and were more finely sculpted with a great deal of style. While the arty one seemed quirky more than fine. Maybe the fineness of the idea eluded me.I said, since I thought they were very finely made, I'd call the regular dogs 'fine art', and the other one 'quirky art'.She mentioned that the quirky/arty one she had been championing had been her choice to bring in to the gallery, so that may have explained her harder sell!

On a different note, my hoodrat is now finished and installed, and as soon as I get a nice sunny day to get some pics of him showing off around town I'll post a few!

Putting it all together (making micro size bumper to bumper turtle sculpture)

In our last exciting episode we watched from the edge of our seats while our intrepid hero risked life and limb to fearlessly cut up pieces of granite tile and polish the edges.
All without the use of a safety net.
This time those tiles get pressed into service as small sculpture bases.
I used a DREMEL engraver (it vibrates a pointy end to break up surfaces and engrave things).
Some JB Weld, which is a top notch epoxy resin recommended by my main man at Advanced Casting, Frank. He casts my tiny turtle parts. A white chinagraph pencil, and some paperclips and other stuff to mix up the epoxy round out the list of stuff I'll need.
I mark the turtle positions (inside the boundary of each piece) with the chinagraph pencil onto the granite surface.
I use the extremely ominous looking DREMEL engraver to hammer on the granite to roughen it up. This provides a 'tooth' for the epoxy to adhere to. Of course I use all the relevant safety gear (see DREMEL instructions for more info). You don't want granite dust so fine it looks like smoke drifting into places on your (or anyone else's) person it doesn't belong.
That is one noisy tool for something so small! It sounds like a road crew with pneumatic drills has broken in and is trying to smash up your kitchen sink.
I rough up the bottoms of the turtle parts then mix up the epoxy and stick 'em on the granite.
I like to wait overnight for the epoxy to fully cure. Of course I allow my attention to wander a bit during this phase: perhaps towards the tv for instance.

The next day, self adhesive felt dots and a signature are added...
Viola! A micro sized version of 'bumper to bumper'.
Ready for its close up.


Here's my elaborate photographic set up. A bit of blue gray paper propped up, some Lowel Ego lights, a reflector, and a bean bag for the camera to rest on. I learned a lot from Gary Regester's site on lighting with Lowel Ego's. You'll get better photo tips from him than me!

I tweeked the contrast a bit in photoshop to blow out the background more towards white, and I also set the camera to over expose one stop when I took the pics.

The rest of my bronzes are all here on my website.

Is that a frog in your fridge...?

What self respecting sculptor of critters hasn't had a frog in their fridge at one time or another?
Well, it's not a real frog. And it's actually more of a toad with its prominent parotid glands and all. No warts though. Oliver Cromwell would not have been impressed (the puritanical fun hater who outlawed parties and who insisted on his portrait being done 'warts and all').
My toad has no warts. Kind of a frog/toad hybrid.
Trog? Froad?
Hybrids are all the rage these days!
But why is he in the fridge?
Nope, he's not made of chocolate.
But a very soft wax that tends to droop when it gets warm (it gets really sticky and awkward just from the heat of my fingers).
I'd started him a couple of years ago and just got the urge to finish it, so prior to taking it over to be molded I kept him where he'd stay nice and cool.
You can see he's been shamelessly raiding our butterfly crisper.

By the way, that stuff in the white pot will melt your guts. It's just nasty. Green chili #2 from the Horseman's Haven in Santa Fe. I'll stick to the regular version from now on, that's plenty hot enough.

Website here.

Next steps in bringing my tiny elephant sculpture to bronze...

Here we are again, with my teeny tiny version of 'Senior moment'.
In the last installment I demonstrated how I made the original in a wax based clay.
So how do we turn one finished sculpture into a bunch of wax replicas ready for the foundry to then turn them into bronze?
My buddy Lee Wilson got busy making a mold. He's molded everything from the almost microscopic to bigger than a horse (see behind?). Nothing fazes Lee!
Here he is holding a work in progress on my miniature elephant...
The silicone rubber master mold is floppy (that's the yellow stuff), and needs a hard mother mold which can be screwed tightly around it to hold it in place (that's the white stuff).
I wonder is mold language developed similar to tool language, what with their male and female parts and all?With all the silicone rubber 'chew toys' laying about I was surprised and a bit nervous to discover from experience that mold makers seem to like to have a dog or two about the place. Must be the loneliness of the job.
Anyhow, Lee's are extremely well trained and only once got interested in sniffing the rubber when he was molding some cow bones for someone!
One rebuke put an end to that and they have NEVER messed with his handiwork, so I'm confident leaving my molds over at his place for extended periods.
So here he is tightening the bolts to keep the whole thing snugly together (you'll see why next)...
This is Lee's new toy! It's a wax injector. So for smaller stuff he can squirt wax into the mold under pressure (which will squirt out all over the place if the mold isn't securely held tight). It's quicker and more effective than painting the wax into the mold by hand on small things like this.

He experimented a bit to get the wax temperature and pressure optimal for various sized pieces. He mixed some pigment in with a blue green wax to make it a nice natural clay color. That way it's easier to see if any seam lines need cleaning up than if the wax is a day-glo color (plenty of waxes are very strange colors). You can see a few of my turtles, toads and rabbits floating about on the table too.
That metal plate with a hole in it is what he holds over the bottom of the mold when he squirts the wax in. Then it's left to cool for 20 or 30 minutes.
If the mold only has a narrow opening, he'll just use a washer.
Alright, let's pop that thing open and see what we've got!
Off comes the mother mold...
Wait for it...
Ta-daaaa!!!!
And Lee has given birth to yet another teeny tiny wax elephant. Didn't hurt did it?
Family photo below.
Strange gene pool I'd say.If I can get the foundry to take some pics of sprueing up the waxes, investing and breaking them open I'll add them to a future post, then finish up with metal chasing (should hardly be any except grinding the bottoms), and patina which I will do myself.

My website here

Step by step how to make a tiny elephant sculpture

OK, so I'm making a very tiny version of my 'Senior Moment' sculpture. An elephant in Rodin's famous 'Thinker' pose. Above you can see the tools I used. Some wooden shaped things and some metal pointy things with little round blobs on the end, which I believe are called 'fillet' or 'fill-it' tools. Can't say for sure, but I think that's what they're called!
And of course my favorite tools, which I use the most, my fingers.
The first thing I did was reduce all the measurements I have in proportion to the size elephant I'm making. I'd taken proportional measurements from pics of elephants, anatomy books, pics of skeletons and what not, so each time I start him in a new size, I have measurements to rely on since I don't trust myself one bit to eyeball it as I go.
So above we see, from left to right, a base for him to sit on, his rib cage, pelvis, and skull.
This is the 4th time I've made him. Like a line of Mercedes cars to fit any budget!
So far the biggest is some 20 odd inches tall, and this guy is the smallest at 2.75" tall!
Here they are all together (above). Looks like a weird fish leaping out of the water, eh?
Now you can see why I don't trust myself to eyeball proportions. Everything looks so weird at this stage I'd be second guessing myself like crazy if I didn't know it would all end up looking right later.
Some muscles are added, so it's really handy to have anatomical reference standing by.
The head's bizzare looking, all duck billed and strange since it's just a skull, and elephants have the strangest looking skulls of just about anything.
Oh, I did take some liberties with the length of the thighs to get the pose to work. That's the case in all four different size versions.
I add the clay in small blobs. I find it's easier to add anatomically and keep the life in it, than scrape away excess and hope it doesn't lose its suppleness. That's just me of course, some people work subtractively from rock for instance. Mmmm, let's see, oh yes. Michelangelo springs to mind.
He was pretty handy with a subtractive approach, I'm sure you will agree!
Notice the ear above is made up of blobs of clay depending on where the form goes. I didn't make a flat bit of clay and stick it on. There's some folds appearing around his legs and mouth as well as muscle and fat taking shape.
This is the only size of this piece that didn't need any armature support at all, since the clay is very light and sticky, and he's so small.
The clay I use is jmac wax based plastilene, the softest one they do. It can get a bit messy if you aren't careful. When using tools, I go with the same approach I learned when painting. Get the biggest one you can that will do the job, that way I don't end up with over fussy patting effects, just nice clean broad strokes. That's the most important thing to maintain. Adding details is easy later, but taking an over fussily detailed sculpture back to something more elegantly simple is much more difficult. Not least because you don't want to scrape back all that hard work you put in!
I might fiddle around with him a bit more, but for now he's pretty much done.
One thing I've learned making small stuff which is cast solid (not hollow like bigger stuff) using a more brittle plaster investment than ceramic shell is to make sure not to have any deep recesses with sharp bottoms. You have to smooth them out with the round blob on a stick tool. Otherwise, bits of investment fall off and float around in the bronze during casting, only to surface as pits all over the place. A tiny amount is tolerable, but if you have lots of grooves cut into your original piece, say with a knife or other sharp tool, it's bad news later.

The pic below was sent to my man at the foundry to show him where the tunnels are and see if it will give him any problems with mold making and casting. The mouse is for scale (he knows how big it is) since if you cast solid bronze beyond a certain size, you run into all kinds of shrinkage problems.
Especially if it has skinny protruberances, since ideally the metal is runnier and hotter for skinny things (or it won't make it to the ends), but cooler and thicker for larger bodied things (or it will shrink away from the mold as it cools). Both in one go can be problematic since you can only pour the metal at one temperature for the whole piece.
If elephants are scared of mice this guy must be terrified!
Keep your eyes peeled for the finished bronze (I'd say give it a month or two)!
I'm pretty excited to see it all done!