The Tiger has a new home, at Shidoni Foundry in NM!

The foundry that is casting this sculpture is not in Houston, instead it is in New Mexico. That means three things:

The molds are loaded up into a truck for a road trip to NM. 

1. The tiger molds need to take a trip from Houston, Texas to Shidoni Foundry in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

2. The molds will eventually need to come back to Houston. I'll be flying back to NM to look at the metal and approve the sculpture before it ships out.

3. The sculpted tiger will be taking a long trip from Santa Few, New Mexico to Grambling State University in Louisiana. It would be fun to see if anyone can spot it on the long journey.

If you have been following this blog you will see that the sculpting is complete, and 1/2 of the foundry process is complete.  The molds have been made and now the foundry will be painting waxes in all of these molds.  I'll keep the documentation going with the help of Shidoni.

DATE OF INSTALLATION? We are all trying to have the sculpture on campus by Nov 2nd for homecoming, but there are no promises. A lot of coordinating needs to be done for this to happen. Stay tuned.

I'm looking forward to seeing the entire thing together. Remember I could not see all of the rocks with the tiger as it was not feasible to put it entirely together in the hot warehouse in Houston. I can't wait to see it all together at Shidoni.

Not the best of weather. We were trying to outrun an unusual storm that was coming from the southeast. 

The truck arrives at Shidoni and we unload the molds. 

This is my first piece cast at Shidoni. I have always wanted to cast my sculptures at this foundry. 

The sculpture garden at Shidoni. 

This is the burn out oven at Shidoni. It is pretty big. 

How to put this back together.

Can you imagine being a person at the foundry and getting all of these many, many molds and trying to figure out how to put this back together.  Documentation! Today I finish the book that will be shipped with the tiger sculpture. It documents how many molds there are and how to put the sculpture together. 

The upper rock is labeled before the mold is taken apart. The lines in between are registration lines. 

The lower  rock is labeled in a different color. 

Can you imagine getting this and wondering what part it is?  labeling is important. Guess which part of the tiger this might be.  

So busy I have not been able to post, but here is the latest.

We finally finished all of the molds on the tiger. As you have read in previous posts we needed a rubber mold and a mother mold.  Once that was done it was on to the rock. First we put the upper and lower section of rock together and then cut it in half for mold making.  We could not do resin and fiberglass outside of the studio so we coated the inside of my home studio with plastic. It made it look quite spooky but it served its purpose. The same process took place on both the upper and lower rocks. First rubber was painted on and then fiberglass. We worked long hours and one night worked through until 8:00 a.m.  I'm really doing my best to try to get this to the foundry as early as possible. Next week, when I am at the foundry,  we will find out if the sculpture can be delivered in time for homecoming. 

The ears and teeth are cut off of the head and it is covered first in rubber, then in a fiberglass mother mold. 

Those are some big rocks. 

The studio is coated in plastic to protect from fiberglass fibers and dust. 

A delivery to my front porch means there is lots of work ahead of us . 

I had a wonderful team of people helping with the rocks. 

All night long!

We are burning the midnight oil, and someways working All ngiht long. Five interns are on call. Just  to be able to finish the tiger by next week so that we can bring the molds to the foundry in New Mexico. More updates soon.

Moved out of the warehouse and skinned a tiger.

We had all of the torso molds at the warehouse and the torso was still there as well.  We literally had to skin the tiger. We separated the foam pieces from the armature and brought everything back to the studio.  These will be saved until the foundry confirms they have metal.

IT is time to skin the rest of the tiger. Each of the pieces will be saved until the foundry confirms they have a metal. Just incase anything happens to the molds we could use these to reconstruct the tiger. 

The metal armature foam is surrounded by the foam

The interns and I work diligently to clean the warehouse.  Yes, we even scraped the duct tape off of the warehouse floor. 

It has just been two months, but we are finished with this space. It is a good thing as the temperature is over 100 degrees.