Home of the Innocents bronzes

This is ascension. It has yet to be sandblasted and have a patina applied

Here is Metamorphosis with butterflies flying from the blanket.

A side view of the butterflies

This is Art Castings Foundry in Loveland, Colorado where the sculptures for the Home of the Innocents are being cast.

The waxes are dipped into ceramic slurry (a 14 day process to build up a sufficient shell) and are then put into a burnout
oven where the wax is melted out and the ceramic shell hardens. When the shells come out of the oven they are ready to be filled with bronze.

Here is the bronze being poured. It is over 2,000 degrees fahrenheit.

These are the areas where individual sculptures are "chased" Chasing means that the places where the gates and sprues were attached, as well as welded areas, are carved to duplicate the original surface of the sculpture.

While posting pictures from my trip to the Colorado foundry, I found a couple of images that I thought were interesting.
This is an odd flower, no idea what it is. It had been raining and the light was getting low, so I had to use a flash. But that made it stand out more from the background.

This is the summit of Sundance Mountain.

Next comes Rock

I met Don Lawler in 1991 when he was set up at a fair selling stone sculptures with his then partner, Bobby Howard.

"Wow!" I thought. They were making and selling sculptures made of stone. Maybe I could learn to carve stone!

No more piles of paper clippings, endless folding of paper, sore fingers from scissors. Stone didn't have to be protected in a case like paper. Months of work wouldn't be ruined because it got rained on.

Of course I discovered that stone has it's own unpleasant qualities, like weight (150 lbs. a cubic foot) unending amounts of dust ( it gets in everything and goes everywhere - it took down two of our computers) and it can be annoyingly slow as you only work stone one way, by removing material, take too much off,

well, that's too bad. So it's carve, look, carve, look from this angle, with a mirror, on and on. But overall it's a lot of fun.

This sculpture is the Waking Muse which is an earthwork and stone sculpture at the Prairie Center for the Arts in Schaumburg, IL. This sculpture was done with my partner, Don

Lawler.