SNAP! New Kickstarter (miniature snapping turtles).

Snapping turtles quibble over small change

My new year's resolution is on schedule (to launch 4 Kickstarters in 2015) with these little beasties!

They are New York's official state reptile, can live for a hundred years, and snap your fingers right off!

These are safe enough though, even in your pockets.

The project runs until Tuesday March 24, so if you like what you see, CLICK HERE to visit the project, and then snap one up!



Click these links to visit my website...SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille

New shiny patinas, and a contest update...

Tiny bronze rabbits, shiny bright patina. Steve Worthington.

Tiny Wilbur bronze rabbit, shiny bright patina. Steve Worthington.

Tiny Alfie bronze rabbit, shiny bright patina. Steve Worthington.

I've decided I love this tumbled then lacquered (or they'd quickly tarnish) finish for my tiny bunnies!
I've just put them all up on my Etsy store...

Tiny Bianca bronze rabbit, shiny bright patina. Steve Worthington.

Tiny Binky bronze rabbit, shiny bright patina. Steve Worthington.

Tiny Penelope bronze rabbit, shiny bright patina. Steve Worthington

Entries are now closed for my guess the future weight (Aug 1st 2012) of the chubby artist (me) contest.
All bets are in, now we'll just have to let time run its course.

It seems that the combination of my very own austerity fridge, and a chart for weekly visual feedback is doing the trick!
I'm going to try and slide under the bottom guess (which is 180 lbs), but we'll see, eh!
Here's my chart so far...(where it says  '3 month goals' it should be '12 week goals')

Chubby artist contest chart as of March 3, 2012

The winner of the blog portion (mention my contest in your blog to enter a draw for a winged angel mouse) has been won by Nancy Vance.
Congratulations Nancy!
I'll send you a winged angel mouse when they are back from the foundry (unless you want a non-winged mouse, in which case I can send you one now).

Click these links to visit my website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille

Trying some things out, and this year's Barkin' Ball...

Tiny swimming bronze turtles in resin 'water'

Originally I wanted to make bronze turtles swimming through glass that was cast around them.
But I asked a glass blower and learned that it would crack and break up as it cooled around the hard metal, so I explored other options, deciding to give a urethane resin a try.
I was advised to wear rubber gloves and eye protection, and avoid getting the uncured resin on my skin, as some people have an allergy to it and can develop a poison oak type of reaction.
And if you aren't allergic to it, you can become sensitive to it, so best avoid the situation and cover up.

Once it's cured it's completely harmless, clear, and hard as nails.
Just like what I wanted glass for, so I gave it a go.

turtles on the window sill while the 'water' cures

paraphernalia

You have to be really precise in mixing the A and B volumes. That's what the syringes are for.
The straws are for stirring them together.
And once mixed you have a limited working time before it starts to 'go off'.
And you have to keep it quite warm (ideally 140ºF) while it sets, or it will never cure completely.
So the window sill and a lamp took care of that.
The bronze was too hot to touch all afternoon.

Well I really like the effect, especially with a greeny colored patina under it, to contrast with the turtles.
It's got me interested in coming up with other things to do with it!

Mike finished the metalwork on my tree frogs on a vine and did a very nice job on the patina (of course!).
I'm undecided as yet about which base I prefer. I'm having the round metal one all tarted up so I can compare them side by side. I like its minimal profile, but I also like the reflectiveness of the granite.
We'll see...

Mike Masse doing his thing on my tree frogs on a vine

unfinished metal base

Barkin' Ball came along unexpectedly quickly this year. I almost didn't get my mice in on time!

Yee-haw! It's Barkin' Ball 2010.

These critters found a great home...

But I'm glad to say they found a great home at the end of the silent auction to benefit the humane society's animal shelter here in Santa Fe.

The Mouse Project cover and page layouts are coming along nicely, I'm using Lulu.com, so I'll have to post a few pics of them next time around. I haven't done the wordy bits yet. But soon I will have done, then as soon as the last pics come in I should be just about able to drop 'em in and be all done!

Click these links to visit my website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille

Contest: Guess the length of the snake and win a bronze turtle!

I said this week's post would be more fun!

I ran into Marcel, a photographer friend out running with his dogs around our local trail the other day.
Well I suppose to be more accurate he ran into me, since I was walking!
He'd recently been round our place to photograph my tree frog (the real one) to use as part of one of his always interesting compositions....

Cutle little critter, eh?

Well, after Marcel ran off in his direction and I walked off in mine, I found this rather handsome beast!
Marcel must have run right past it!

A fine looking specimen of a bull snake, I'm sure you'll agree!

And whoever can guess closest to how long the snake is will win a tiny bronze turtle.
The bigger one, since I'm all out of the smallest one right now!

Not a very spectacular prize, but then again, not a very involved contest! Just take a wild guess and either leave it as a comment on this post or email it to me.

Closing date is my next blog post when I'll announce the winner, whenever that is (most likely the weekend of May 15/16), so if this is still the most recent post, have a go!

I'm adding this after only a day since I've had such a great response already: at this rate it's entirely possible by the close of this contest multiple people could guess it right, in which case I'll assign them numbers and roll a dice to determine the winner.

Only one guess per person though, so don't email every size by the inch between 1 and 100 feet!

I'll take these snake pics with me back to the spot and lay out a string to match its position, then measure it.

Good luck!


Click these links to visit my website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille

Update on ....of...... Galleries, last I heard is that he's not responding to phone calls and emails from the collection folks who are trying to recover my share of his selling some bronzes of mine. (Edit-issue resolved after 1 yr thanks to Goldman, Evans and Trammell)

Tiny turtle dilemma – the problems involved when producing miniature bronze turtle sculptures

There’s a great Seinfeld 2 part story called ‘the bottle deposit’ where Kramer and Newman are racking their brains to figure something out: Newman wants to take empty beer bottles to Michigan and deposit them for the extra five cents you get in that state.

Kramer tells him it’s impossible.
If they drive them there, the gas, toll booth and truck rental prices will kill them.
Newman’s determined to crunch the numbers every possible way to make it add up.

I have a similar dilemma with my tiny turtles.
Plenty of people have told me it’s not worth the hassle making tiny pieces. The work involved means you have to charge a lot, or you just don’t make any money on them.
Things with my tiny turtles seemed to be going well. But my supplier got fed up fiddling with them since his casting results were inconsistent. Sometimes they’d come out just fine, so he could give them to me after minimal metal finishing. If that happened every time things would still be great.

But the metal finishing is where he loses money since he gave me a per piece fixed price based on the assumption of consistently good casting results. But sometimes there’d be problems that would need extra time to fix (time is money), or he’d just ditch the problem ones and cast more. Again, wasted time and effort on his part. His prices were great for me, which is what I based my retail price on. But he’s had enough of making them.

So now I’m getting them made somewhere else, but it’s costing me more. They’re casting great, but the sprues the foundry puts on the bottom are bigger than my previous supplier’s, and they obliterate more of the under surface, including my initials.
So they need more work done after casting (after cutting off the bigger sprue, the bottom of the turtle needs to be metal worked, essentially re-sculpting that portion where the sprue was attached on each one), and that extra time adds to the bill.
I don’t want to raise the price on them, they’re 2 of my most affordable pieces.
I like that just about anyone who wants one can get one.



Here’s my options. Do I :-

Stop making them, it’s just too much trouble.
Drop the quality (just flatten off the bottom rather than have metal workers re-sculpt it) so I can still make a bit of money on them (they’d look fine except from underneath)?
Maintain the original quality but raise the price so I can still make a bit of money on them?
Maintain quality but keep the original price so I make next to nothing but you can still have one to enjoy at the same price as before, while I continue to explore other options?

I have decided to go with the last option:
Keep the same price, while trying to figure out a way to make it work.
At least for now.

Like Newman I’m hoping to find a successful ‘other option’ before too long and prove the nay sayers wrong!

They are available from me directly, from my Etsy store, and from some of the galleries I show in.

Final bronze elephant and more garden snake action!

Well I've been tooling around town in the hoodrat mobile lately to some satisfyingly bemused expressions.
And I've got the teeny tiny version of 'Senior moment' all finished up.
I posted a previous blog on making the original clay HERE, followed that up with mold making and shooting waxes HERE, and here's the finished piece (which you can see more views of on my Etsy store and website).

But the really exciting news is another snake sighting in the back yard!
This time it wasn't the usual bull snake, it was a COACHWHIP snake.

Meridee called me outside saying my snake was hanging out in some old budlia branches, but when I saw him I recognized he wasn't old faithful.
I've bumped into a few of these before. They often look quite pink. They like to lunch on lizards.

And the one's I've seen can shift like nothing else. One time I was sure I must have run one over that decided to make a mad dash across the road.
It was moving like someone had it on a long string tied to a sprinting greyhound, but a peek in the rear view mirror showed no road kill I'm glad to say.

So I was pretty careful not to get too close at first or else I would have spooked it into speeding off and missed my photo op. I edged closer very slowly...
Look at those beady eyes!
Curiously, a neighbor gravely told me, shortly after we moved in, that coachwhip snakes gang together in long grass and stand on their heads and will whip at your legs with their tails leaving quite serious wounds.

Fortunately I managed to express surprise without delivering any serious wounds to myself through suppressed laughter. I reckon that little gem got into circulation around the era of the 'Little house on the prairie' when some big scaredy cat maybe ran away from a garter snake or something, through some bushes and had to explain his scratches and actions to an inquisitive audience of his peers.

Or if not his peers, perhaps some very young children, who are prone to believe whatever a grown up tells them. I imagine he stumbled scratched, panting and bleeding out into a clearing of tiny yet studiously attentive Sunday school students.

But I digress. My photo op finally made a break for it, and covered a couple of dozen feet in what seemed like less than a second to hide behind a bush.I checked it out from one side of the bush, then the other side, then back again and it wasn't there!
I hunted around, but I couldn't find it anywhere.
Take your eyes off for a second and whoosh.
Gone.
Oh well.
I wonder what will show up next.

Putting it all together (making micro size bumper to bumper turtle sculpture)

In our last exciting episode we watched from the edge of our seats while our intrepid hero risked life and limb to fearlessly cut up pieces of granite tile and polish the edges.
All without the use of a safety net.
This time those tiles get pressed into service as small sculpture bases.
I used a DREMEL engraver (it vibrates a pointy end to break up surfaces and engrave things).
Some JB Weld, which is a top notch epoxy resin recommended by my main man at Advanced Casting, Frank. He casts my tiny turtle parts. A white chinagraph pencil, and some paperclips and other stuff to mix up the epoxy round out the list of stuff I'll need.
I mark the turtle positions (inside the boundary of each piece) with the chinagraph pencil onto the granite surface.
I use the extremely ominous looking DREMEL engraver to hammer on the granite to roughen it up. This provides a 'tooth' for the epoxy to adhere to. Of course I use all the relevant safety gear (see DREMEL instructions for more info). You don't want granite dust so fine it looks like smoke drifting into places on your (or anyone else's) person it doesn't belong.
That is one noisy tool for something so small! It sounds like a road crew with pneumatic drills has broken in and is trying to smash up your kitchen sink.
I rough up the bottoms of the turtle parts then mix up the epoxy and stick 'em on the granite.
I like to wait overnight for the epoxy to fully cure. Of course I allow my attention to wander a bit during this phase: perhaps towards the tv for instance.

The next day, self adhesive felt dots and a signature are added...
Viola! A micro sized version of 'bumper to bumper'.
Ready for its close up.


Here's my elaborate photographic set up. A bit of blue gray paper propped up, some Lowel Ego lights, a reflector, and a bean bag for the camera to rest on. I learned a lot from Gary Regester's site on lighting with Lowel Ego's. You'll get better photo tips from him than me!

I tweeked the contrast a bit in photoshop to blow out the background more towards white, and I also set the camera to over expose one stop when I took the pics.

The rest of my bronzes are all here on my website.

Next steps in bringing my tiny elephant sculpture to bronze...

Here we are again, with my teeny tiny version of 'Senior moment'.
In the last installment I demonstrated how I made the original in a wax based clay.
So how do we turn one finished sculpture into a bunch of wax replicas ready for the foundry to then turn them into bronze?
My buddy Lee Wilson got busy making a mold. He's molded everything from the almost microscopic to bigger than a horse (see behind?). Nothing fazes Lee!
Here he is holding a work in progress on my miniature elephant...
The silicone rubber master mold is floppy (that's the yellow stuff), and needs a hard mother mold which can be screwed tightly around it to hold it in place (that's the white stuff).
I wonder is mold language developed similar to tool language, what with their male and female parts and all?With all the silicone rubber 'chew toys' laying about I was surprised and a bit nervous to discover from experience that mold makers seem to like to have a dog or two about the place. Must be the loneliness of the job.
Anyhow, Lee's are extremely well trained and only once got interested in sniffing the rubber when he was molding some cow bones for someone!
One rebuke put an end to that and they have NEVER messed with his handiwork, so I'm confident leaving my molds over at his place for extended periods.
So here he is tightening the bolts to keep the whole thing snugly together (you'll see why next)...
This is Lee's new toy! It's a wax injector. So for smaller stuff he can squirt wax into the mold under pressure (which will squirt out all over the place if the mold isn't securely held tight). It's quicker and more effective than painting the wax into the mold by hand on small things like this.

He experimented a bit to get the wax temperature and pressure optimal for various sized pieces. He mixed some pigment in with a blue green wax to make it a nice natural clay color. That way it's easier to see if any seam lines need cleaning up than if the wax is a day-glo color (plenty of waxes are very strange colors). You can see a few of my turtles, toads and rabbits floating about on the table too.
That metal plate with a hole in it is what he holds over the bottom of the mold when he squirts the wax in. Then it's left to cool for 20 or 30 minutes.
If the mold only has a narrow opening, he'll just use a washer.
Alright, let's pop that thing open and see what we've got!
Off comes the mother mold...
Wait for it...
Ta-daaaa!!!!
And Lee has given birth to yet another teeny tiny wax elephant. Didn't hurt did it?
Family photo below.
Strange gene pool I'd say.If I can get the foundry to take some pics of sprueing up the waxes, investing and breaking them open I'll add them to a future post, then finish up with metal chasing (should hardly be any except grinding the bottoms), and patina which I will do myself.

My website here