Animal sketches made for sculptures

Bit of a quick post this week.
Just a handful of animal scribbles I've made at various times for working from:
mainly bits and pieces that caught my attention I didn't want to forget.

I got a bunch of spectacular pics of Sprightly in Antarctica this last week, so I'll be posting them soon.
I don't think the mice need any introduction.
This was my old room-mate's puppy, Kahlua the chocolate lab. I almost became a sculptor when I got stuck into making a model of him out of Sculpey probably back in 1998, but it got broken and I never finished it.
It would be several years later before I got my hands on some clay and the sculpting bug finally got a hold of me!
This is my tree frog. I've got a few more ideas to do with tree frogs right now.
These are some macaque expressions and hairstyle studies I made for my monkey/turtle discus thrower.
Grumpy old toads.

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

The birth of Nosey mouse

It was in the last couple of days of 2006 that Nosey was born.
At least in clay. There was still the trial by fire that had to come before bronzes would emerge.
First I took lots of pictures of the real Nosey, nosing around.

Then I poked and prodded and added to my blob of wax based clay.

I kept poking and prodding and adding until finished.

A fairly lengthy process followed whereby a mold was made (bad news for the clay version, it gets a bit trashed in the process).

Then wax duplicates come from the mold (good news for the immortality of Nosey).

The fine folks at Anderson Enterprise are responsible for casting my mice.

After they've each been invested in their own one time breakable molds, the wax is melted out, and bronze poured in its place. Then they are broken out (sounds very wild west), cleaned up (a bit like me after an exciting feed), patinated and...
...Voila, Nosey mouse is immortal (unless there's ever a countrywide sweep for bronze mice to melt down and use for tiny cannons).Click here to see lots more of my sculptures on my website.