In an earlier post we talked bruises in marble, which are the bane of modern marble sculptors. They’re like a pimple on your sculpture’s nose and there is no effective makeup for marble. Surprisingly, bruising wasn’t an issue for the ancients. In fact, as we’ll see in a different post, the available carving techniques priorContinue reading “Many Kinds of Realism”
Tag Archives: marble
Bruising Marble
This posting went almost unseen when I first put it up, six months ago, so after reworking it a little I’m re-posting it. The changes are cosmetic so if you feel like you’ve seen it before you probably have. If you carve marble or alabaster you know about bruising. I’m talking about the indelible milkyContinue reading “Bruising Marble”
The Figure #11: Every Disaster Is An Opportunity
What an ominously Pollyanna-ish title! So here’s what’s going on. I’ve been chewing away at the stone, stripping off the thickest areas to make it easier to drill down to a denser array of points. In a few areas I’ve gone a step farther and taken it all the way down, leaving just enough forContinue reading “The Figure #11: Every Disaster Is An Opportunity”
The Figure #10: Pointing and Carving!
It took a while to get here, but we’re finally carving marble. The process is to use a pointing machine to locate key points on the plaster model and then transfer them to stone using a pointing machine. There’s a video below of setting it up and starting the carving on the figure. The PointingContinue reading “The Figure #10: Pointing and Carving!”
Aside: Making a Pneumatic Point Chisel
I have two nice Trow and Holden B-series pneumatic hammers for sculptors. They are sweet little tools, awesome for claw chisels, straight chisels, and bush hammers. The bigger one is the green device in the picture below. Several other companies make similar hammers, but T&H literally invented this type of pneumatic hammer for stone backContinue reading “Aside: Making a Pneumatic Point Chisel”
A Figure In Stone #5: Standing Up Pt 1
Dragging Out The Block And Standing It Up (Part 1) I recorded some of the process of dragging a 1000-pound block out and squaring it off so it would stand up vertically. It’s fun to impose your will on a half-ton of stone, but lifting or even sliding around heavy things is inherently dangerous. That’sContinue reading “A Figure In Stone #5: Standing Up Pt 1”
Old-School Materials Science
Classical Greek sculpture arrived abruptly as these things go. In the Fifth Century BCE, naturalistic sculpture suddenly replaced the stylized kouroi that had decorated Greek temples for centuries. The sensibility seems to change overnight. It was the same Greeks and there is no matching discontinuity in architecture, so what happened? A lot of things changedContinue reading “Old-School Materials Science”
Sculpture Tech 