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Making and Casting a Bronze Head
Then and Now
by Tuck Langland
The principles are simple, and unchanged. To make a bronze portrait head the artist uses an armature attached to a board, models the head in clay, molds it, casts it into wax, makes an investment mold around that, burns out the wax and pours in the bronze, cleans it up, colors it with chemicals, and mounts it on a base. That’s what Rodin did, and that’s what sculptors still do today.
Or is the process really the same? Actually, though the broad outlines are essentially unchanged, in practice it is different at nearly every step.
Rodin would begin with a board made of several solid boards, and today we use plywood or particleboard. He would have used either a cone of stiffened water clay for an armature, or one made of wood and lead pipe, or perhaps iron bars forged by a blacksmith. We tend to use plumbing parts and aluminum wire.
So far it’s a little different, but not very. |
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