After you spend tons of hours creating a sculpture, the next biggest consideration is to choose an reliable art foundry to cast your works. There are quite a few foundries in Europe, North America. So, how to target an ideal one?
One of the best practices is hearing that your friends say. The foundry your friend recommend must get proven his own experience and therefore trustworthy.
Another good way is via internet. There are tons of information these days on net: traditional website, social network service such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. One of the biggest advantages of social network is that you can communicate with the people from that foundry before you place an order. Usually, there are rich information you can learn from that foundry’s profile page: you can talk with the foundry about their past work, their casting methods, equipment, price, etc. The more you talk with him, the deeper you know about him. There are several factors you’d better take into consideration:
1. Quality. This is one of the most important factors. It’s easy to test a foundry’s quality by letting them do a small scale sculpture such as a life size bust. Then you can watch closely the casting’s finish, patination and other factors. The test casting is a good method to provide you with information for your further selection.
2. Cost. There are many foundries to choose from and you can compare their offers based their work quality into consideration. Nobody wants their carefully sculpted work riddled with imperfection or other poor finish and patination. You can make a list with potential foundries on it. Those foundries should be able to offer you quality work at a reasonable price.
3. Equipment and Technical process. It’s important to understand that small scale and large scale sculptures required different equipments and process. For small sculpture, foundry often use lost wax technique to cast and for large scale sculpture, they use sand casting. Most of small foundries only have lost wax casting equipment while those medium and large foundries have sand casting equipments.
4. Distance. People tend to work with short distance art foundry because that way they can communicate with the foundry easily and it’s easier for them to keep track of the process. The con of choosing based on distance is that the nearest foundry doesn’t always offer best quality at best price. With the developing logistics and long distance videoing technique ( transfer the picture or video of the process to sculptors lively), lots of sculptors can now work with a distant foundry closely with everything under control.
The above are some tips for selecting an ideal art foundry for you. Your ideas or comments are appreciated.
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