The Making of a Cold Cast Relief

Would you like to know how the cold cast relief of Riders on the Wind was made?  It was a process with many steps along the way.  First of course was the concept sketch on paper.

Then I enlarged it on to plywood by "squaring it up" the old fashioned way and began adding clay.

As you can see, I edited the image as I went.  This is the finished clay.  The next step was making the mold.  First a dam was built around the whole relief and then it was filled with silicone mold material.  A plaster mother mold was built on top of that and when it was cured the whole thing was turned upside down and the clay was removed.  This gave me  the empty mold ready to have the cold cast material poured into the mold.

Here is the completed mold.  Notice that it appears in reverse.  The first coat of cold cast material contains the bronze powder.  The next coats fill the remainder of the space in the mold. So the surface of the finished piece contains enough metal to react with cold patina chemicals. When the whole piece is cured, then the finish work begins.

There was a great deal of copper in the mixture I used and the initial look of the piece was verde gris.  I was looking for a more brown finish so further work with other chemicals, steel wool and waxes was needed to obtain the final result.

Here is the finished piece.  I chose cold cast for this piece because it is a better weight for hanging on a wall.  A piece this size in hot cast bronze would need a substantial wall to hold it up but this piece can be  hung on the average drywall .