I’ve been asked to sculpt & produce a lot of ‘AWARDS’ recently…

Gladiator helmet awards

Gladiator helmet awardsI usually sculpt animals and then produce them as limited or open editions, but recently I’ve been asked to design a few different ‘ awards’…

As a sculptor it’s always exciting to be asked to make something new, and I enjoy the process which starts with an idea, and then opens out to become a challenge to solve a series of interesting problems, before the final piece emerges!

When designing awards for other people it is a slightly different way of working because it doesn’t usually initially start with my idea which I can see in my mind’s eye…I have to be able to ‘see’ what the customer has in their mind and then build on that using my knowledge of techniques and materials, taking into consideration any limitations with the choosen material or perhaps even with the budget they have for their project!

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The little slide show above shows one of the award projects that I’m working on at the moment. I was asked to make some Gladiator helmet awards for an American company, based on some work I’d made for an event in 2015, but I was asked to make them bigger. The helmet was first sculpted in wax, moulded and then made in cold-cast bronze. The casts were then polished with wire wool and buffed to a sheen with a polishing mop on a bench grinder, and finally waxed (using the lovely British-made Cherry blossom ready wax!).

The supports are made from stainless steel which has been dressed, and the bases are locally cut sandstone which has been sand blasted. The lettering has been painted by hand and picked out in silver enamel.

As I was saying earlier, design projects become a series of problems to solve and one of the problems was finding a suitable ‘escutcheon’ to cover where the steel support goes into the hole which I drilled in the sandstone. I spent a long time fruitlessly trying to source some, so in the end I made them!

Next, these awards will be put together and shipped off to the US, hopefully next week!

I’ve also recently been making numerous awards for a National dog club in America…more about that next…but I’ll have to go and make the dinner first!!

 

 

 

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Kirsty Armstrong Sculpture