• A brick layer in stone

    sculpture, vM
    stratenmaker hammer

    I started with the next assignment, a stone statue of (and for) a road worker. It's been a busy time, with carving the granite tomb I reported on earlier, the final work on the black granite panipitha and a set of finials and stone masonry in limestone.

    rough sketch in plasticine for a stone statue of a road worker
    Saw model for stone sculpture of road worker in pirschuim

    First I modeled in plasticine a sketch model for the brick layer. After approval, I enlarged that with compasses and scale calipers in 1:3, in green pir foam. It's a pretty crude sawing model, which I'm going to use to quickly saw the big outlines. Because pir foam is very soft , I coated it with polyester to give it a hard top layer. The next few days I'm going to start cutting and carving. Earlier, I have already split a block of dolomite from which I will carve it. I was originally planning on sculpting the statue in the direct carving method, but this is much faster and easier. But much direct carving work still remains, because this model is not very detailed and slightly too bulky, so I still have a lot of leeway when carving. That keeps it interesting!

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    Bonus: matching music: street paver at sea:

  • Four pieces at a time….

    Ov1, PP2, sculpture, vM

    Panipitha

    This past week I spent time working on four different projects at once, all of a different nature. First of all, the work on temperanceblack, square panipeetha just goes on. I've already shaped the top side and started sculpting the last four sides with the Lotus Motif.

    • upper side of black granite paanipeetham is polished. Shivalinga+yoni
    • upper side of black granite paanipeetham is polished. shivalinga +yoni

    It has been an enormous amount of manual work, especially because I could only polish by hand the rounded profile that lies deep in the middle of the block, and the same was true for a large portion of the top. The hole where the lingam has to go I mainly had to cut with a diamond saw, and because the material is so hard, that was almost a day's work for just the hole! But now it's coming along very nice. In the pictures there is a lot of dust and sludge on it, but the whole upper part is already polished deep black to grit 10.000.

    Nasty the first message over dit Panipitha project.
    Nasty the next post over Panipitha     this project.

    Contract work for others

    Then I have two projects in progress for other sculptors: the previously mentioned tombstone, and a bluestone relief.

    • cutting granite with angle grinder, phase 2
    • splitting a block of stone with drill holes and splitting chisels

    Splitting Dolomite

    Finally, I started modelling, to make a stone statue of a brick layer, about which more later. For that, I also split a block of stone, Dolomite or Anröchter Grünstein. Basically, you need to have special sets of feathers and wedges, but I don't own one (they are also rather pricey, and you would soon need something like 15 of them). But not to worry, I made up my own variant. I bought a set of thin wide chisels out of chrome vanadium. I've noticed that splitting goes fine with those when I insert them into the cut. Because the block is 50 cms thick, I drilled a series of holes with the diamond drill (which goes a lot faster than using a hammer drill), sawed a deep cut on three sides, and 10 chisels in the top cut .

    By then giving each chisel a tap until it's snug, and then hitting every chisel again, back and forth, the stone begins to crack at a certain moment. Just wait a little to give the stone time to crack, hit a few times more, and then it breaks-off splendidly! Also works well with concrete demolition, when there's no rebar in it. I first lifted the block up a bit and inserted a piece of angle iron under it, with the tip of the V pointing upwards, making it break in half nicely down the line.

    To the next post about this dolomite project.

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