Bronze Sculpture Casting from 3D Printing
Tany Foundry is one of the first fine art foundries in China applying 3D printing to bronze sculpture casting. 3D Printing is very useful for making patterns directly from digital 3D mold. Recently we us RP for casting bronze sculptures for our old friend Tom , who is a talented sculptors very good at figurative sculpting. The sculptures are two 40 inches tall footballers. The artist sculpted the maquette and scan it with a 3D scanner, scale it up to the inch tall and send us the digital file. We print the sculpture out with Rapid Prototyping for bronze casting. Below is a detailed description of the whole process. This is the maquette of the sculpture, 12 inch tall. The maquette is to be scanned by a 3d scanner. The artist scan the Maquette with a 3D scanner and generate the 3D mold of the sculpture. There are many formats available for RP printing. The most often used is STL and STP. Besides 3D scanning, you can also use 3D software to create digital mould. The most commonly use 3D software is Rhino, Zbrush and Maya. After receiving the digital file from artist, we need to make necessary touch up on the work since there are always some piece missing during the scanning process. After refinement of the 3D mold, we print out the sculpture. We make sure all the textured details of the sculpture are well kept. The printed pieces require our artisan to remove the imperfection and smooth its surface. To do that, we use very fine grain sand paper to sand the piece. The finished work is ready for making silicone rubber mold and wax work. We make silicone rubber mold and the wax work ( for lost wax casting). We pay great attention to the make sure all the details of the wax is in perfect condition. We use lost wax casting to cast bronze sculpture. After the bronze castings come out, we do the metal chase and weld pieces together, check out all the welding seam and smooth them. Bronze sculpture casting has been Tany’s core business and we have a team of very skillful artisans to handle this. After chasing work, we do patina on the bronze casting and seal wax. According to the artist’s needs, we use dark brown for patina and the work is completed and they look really nice. If you have any question about the technical process of Rapid Prototyping ,bronze sculpture casting or need an estimate for making your own work, please contact us. ...
Read MorePubic art Project: steel rebar fabrication Wall
Case Study of Rebar Fabrication Wall Project Description: Rebar Fabrication Wall Dimension: 40 feet x 13 feet Material: Deformed steel bar Production: Fabrication This is a art fabrication project for a creative industry park. It is to be placed at the entrance of the park. The entire rebar fabrication measures 40 feet long and 13 feet tall. It is made up of short sections of rebar. Tany Sculpture has over 30 years experience as sculpture fabricator in China and this is a very interesting project for us to do. First we print out a draft of the fabrication wall, lay it out on ground. Then we cut rebar to the length as the drawing specifies. From the drawing you can see there are thousands of them. Our next step is welding rebars pieces by piece according to the draft. This is labor intense work, requiring patience and skill. We focus accuracy and strength of the welding. Below are some pictures on progress. Artist sent us the drawing of the work as a guide for us to fabricate. The whole piece is made up of numerous short steel rebar. Steel rebar are weaving to a large net like structure. We print out the patterns on a large draft on ground as a guide. All reabr are cut into short pieces first and then welded according to the drawing. The whole piece is erected for adjustment. The finished work. Those colorful characters are stainless steel fabrication. If you have any question about art fabrication or custom metal fabrication. Feel free to contact us. ...
Read MoreTips on Packing and Shipping Sculptures Safely
Nowadays, more and more sculptors and public artists need to ship their works to place far away for exhibition or foundry for metal casting. It is important to take actions to make sure the sculptures arrive at destination safely. Here are some tips we employ. – For small sized work, a strong corrugated carton or solid crafted wood crating is very helpful to protect the sculpture inside. However, wood without fumigation may not be allowed to enter into another country especially Europe, North America and Australia. Therefore, make sure the wood is fumigated or only use plywood, which is a multiple layer structured man made wood. Select the thickness of the wood carefully according to the weight of your sculpture. To make unpacking process easier for the recipient, use stainless steel bolts and nuts instead of nails to fix the cover of crating. Corrugated carton is more suitable for smaller sized work and it works quite well on protection. The more layer corrugated paper, the strong it is. – Outer packing is only the basic protection for sculpture from outside damage to the sculpture. There is strong vibration during delivery, especially shipping by sea. To avoid damage of vibration, make sure to stuff crating or cartoon inside with soft material. Bubble paper, foam and polystyrene are most commonly used. From our experience, polystyrene should be considered as one of the best stuffing material. It can be full all the empty space inside the crafting and absorb the energy of vibration effectively. Here are a case we pack a stainless steel sculpture with polished finish. Since the surface has to be protected carefully, we wrap the stainless steel pieces with very thick bubble paper and stuff the strong plywood crating with foam blocks. – Water drops may generate on the surface of sculpture during sea shipping duo to the severe temperature change, which could do harm to the metal. A good solution to this issue is to wrap a plastic paper or rubble paper around sculpture. Another good solution is place some drying agent in container or crating. The common drying agent is Calcium Chloride, which is cheap yet effective on absorbing water. Place the drying agent properly in crate or container, especially around the wall of container., where water gather. – For shipping large scale sculpture, we section the metal sculpture into several pieces. The way how it is sectioned is depending on the shape of the work. You have to make sure it can be placed into a standard container for sea shipping. Often, we will fabricate a very solid steel frame and pack the sculpture into the frame and tie them together with wire firmly. In you have any question on how to pack and ship your sculpture safely, feel free to drop us an...
Read MoreGold Gilt Bronze Sculpture
Gold gilding is a traditional decorative technique for applying gold leaf to solid surface such as metal, wood, stone. Gold leaf is extremely thin. The average thickness is around 2.4 μ ,whose thickness is only one tens of diameter of a hair. Sculptors worldwide have been long applying gold gilding onto their sculptures. Egypt is one of the earliest to use this technique. In ancient China, sculptors gold gild on bronze sculpture such as Buddha. This made craftsman master the technique quite well because gold gilding is a way to expressing their respect toward Buddha. Japan is another country which master this technique fluently. Tany Foundry, as a leading sculpture foundry in China, has been casting bronze and gold gilding for 30 years. Here are some of benefits of applying gold gilding onto sculptures. Gold, with its luster, makes the sculpture looks really beautiful. Below is the gold gilt sunflowers and lotus Tany Foundrymade for one of the top Chinese artist Xu Jiang.The sculptures are bronze casting and we apply gold leaves onto every single sunflowers, lotus and stone. With proper finish treatment, gold gilding is highly anti-oxidation, which means the sculpture can keep its luster over years.Here are some of gold gilt bronze athlete sculptures Tany Foundry made over 10 years ago. They look just like brand new now even though they are not maintenance regularly. To make the most from gold gilding, we have some tips for sculptors planning to use this technique. If funding allows, use 22K or 24K gold leaf instead of those with lower gold percentage. This could make the gilt sculpture last its luster much longer. Hire skillful gilding craftsman. They can save you a lot of budget. Experienced craftsman is able to make best use of each gold leaf without wasting. Also, they can make a big difference on the final finishing effect. Apply a clear coating after the gilding is finished. The coating works as a protective layer on the gold finish. Feel free to let us know if you have any technical question about gild gilding. Please click...
Read MoreA Case Study of Stainless Steel Fabrication Public Art
In 2010, to celebrate Shanghai World Expo, we worked with artist Huaibing Guan to fabricate a stainless steel public artwork, called Travel in Time. This works measures 88 feet long and 13 feet wide. It’s fabricated with stainless steel by hand. This is a maze like structure with paths inside. People can go through the paths to experience of traveling in time. The whole maze are made up of around 30 separate pieces. The components of this works are square stainless tubes. We print out the drawing and bend, weld stainless tubes according to drawing. Stainless steel fabrication is a laborious works which requires the metal worker with rich experience and knowledge. One of the difficulty of this job is to make sure the separates pieces can fit with each other for installation. After the frame is complicated, we grind those welds to make sure it’s smooth. The final step is painting. According to the artist, we apply white painting onto stainless steel. After completion, we transport the works in Shanghai square and install it. If you have any question on this project or technical question about your own project, please email us....
Read MoreCase Study of Lost Wax Casting for Bronze Sculpture
Lost wax technique is one of the most used methods to cast metal sculpture. It has a very long history. This technique can be defined as a process by which a metal (such as silver, gold, brass or bronze) sculpture is cast from an artist’s sculpture as a wax mould. Here is a case of a sculptures made from lost wax technique in ancient China to show how far lost wax technique can go. This piece is called Zeng Houyi Bowl for holding liquor. The original piece was made around 500 B.C. It was owned by a local king of Ancient China. The most visible character of this piece is its extremely complicated patterns. These are 102 dragons pattern on this 16.5 inch tall works. Considering the time (500 B.C), it’s very unbelievable our ancestors were capable to use lost wax so well. The picture shown is our replica and to be honest, our works is still not as intricate as the original piece. No matter how complicated the sculpture is, there are two basic methods to make wax mould. Direct way: sculptor carves on a wax block directly to make the desired shape. This is a onetime mould because it can only be used once. Indirect way: the wax mold is made from a negative silicone rubber mold which is made from a sculptor’s original piece (clay, plaster, resin etc) The quality of wax work affects the final bronze directly so a wax mold needs a little bit refining after coming out. The thickness of the bronze is controlled by the thickness of wax work so it’s important to keep wax thickness consistent. Inconsistency of wax work may lead to fault or imperfection on the casting duo to the different shrinkage rate of different parts. Though rarely used in large scale sculpture, lost wax is warmly welcome because it’s very suitable for small and intricate piece such as life size figure, bust, etc. The wax used for making the mold varies and I plan to write another post on this topic. Below is a simple demonstration on how a resin master pattern become into a bronze bust. I’ll write a series articles about how to apply lost wax technique to create wonderful bronze sculptures and please let me know if you have any question. Any comment is highly appreciated. ( by Owen...
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