First bronze pour. - Will Wooten Art

Here are the stills I snapped to accompany the video of a few fellow students prepping for and pouring molten bronze metal into our first set of plaster sculpture casts for class. I have to say that his is one of the more fascinating things I have witnessed. There are quite a few photos, so I set the slide show on auto with short intervals to help breeze through them all. Also! Our instructor tossed either a penny or a dime (can't remember which) onto one of the wells full of molten metal and then scraped it across the surface with a piece of rebar that created a chemical reaction and released this series of intensely white bursts of flame. The end product of this was somewhat of a sulfur-yellow glob from which there emanated a sort of wispy, white tuft of hair you can sort of make out in the last few photos (my instructor later said it this was the formation of ash that had collected rapidly as a result of the intense heat). What a phenomenon!

This is what the model of my molar sculpture looked like.

Everything is formed from wax, including a system of vents and pour spouts called "gaiting."

Using a technique called the 'lost wax' method, the entire thing (save for about 5/6 of the cup) will be immersed in plaster and heated in a kiln for the weekend.

Everything is burned out while in the kiln to form a cavity that consists of these vents and spouts within the plaster..

MixMasters.

Mine is on the bottom left.

..heating the crucible and melting the bronze..

The Man, himself.

..everybody's plaster molds..

..it's cool looking if you manually toggle back and forth between the left ~>

<~and right arrows to "animate" these two photos..

..on the space man tip..

..this is where I came in taking photos after the video in the previous post..

AWESOME!

..a trough for ingots..

..here is where our instructor scraped the coin across the surface of the molten bronze..

..and here is the result of that coin..

..wtf?

..here, with the flash, you can really make out the tuft of old-man "hair."

..my phone battery died the day I took this out of the plaster, so JUMP to the following day, you can see the remnant nubs of the venting system mentioned earlier..