Sculpture-Making Process

I begin most sculptures on a computer, but I do not want the finished work to feel digital.

The screen is where I work out proportion, movement, balance, and the strange little emotional problem inside the form. Houdini and ZBrush let me push the sculpture before it becomes expensive, heavy, fragile, or impossible to change. But the final object still has to survive the real world. It has to deal with heat, gravity, welding, grinding, polishing, stone dust, kiln schedules, shipping crates, fingerprints, and human judgment.

That is where the work becomes sculpture.

My process sits between digital precision and very old material knowledge. I use contemporary tools to design the form, then traditional fabrication methods to make it physically present. Crystal, stainless steel, marble, granite, and bronze all behave differently. They do not just change the look of a sculpture. They change its emotional temperature.

Stainless steel reflects the world back at you. Crystal holds light inside itself. Stone gives the form weight, silence, and geological time. Bronze carries an older sculptural language of heat, casting, patina, and touch.

The same animal can become different emotional states depending on the material. That is why the making process matters. Material is not just the vehicle. Material is part of the idea.

The materials may look controlled, polished, and finished, but the feeling underneath is not always calm. That tension is important to me: controlled surfaces carrying unstable inner states. A sculpture can look smooth on the outside and still hold a roar, a held breath, a laugh, a sob, or a small private collapse inside it.

My crystal sculptures are made using a form of lost-wax kiln casting. It is related to the traditions of Lalique, pâte de verre, and Chinese liuli, but it is not exactly the same thing. Every artist, studio, and foundry has its own methods, recipes, firing schedules, and tricks learned through failure.

The basic idea is ancient: make the form in wax, surround it with a heat-resistant mold, remove the wax, and use the empty space it leaves behind to create the final sculpture.

With bronze, molten metal is usually poured into the mold. With crystal, the process is different. The crystal is loaded into or above the mold and melted inside a kiln. The glass flows slowly into the cavity as the temperature rises. It is less dramatic than a bronze pour, but less forgiving in many ways.

A crystal piece can fail because of a wrong temperature, a trapped bubble, uneven thickness, a bad firing schedule, or cooling too quickly. The kiln cannot simply be opened when the glass looks done. The sculpture has to cool through a controlled annealing schedule. This can take days. If the cooling is rushed, the internal stress can cause the piece to crack, split, or sometimes fail completely.

After the casting comes the less glamorous part, and usually the part people do not see. The mold is broken away. Sprues are cut off. The rough surface is ground back. Details are chased and cleaned. Edges are corrected. Some surfaces are polished. Some are sandblasted so they hold light softly instead of reflecting it sharply.

I use lead-free crystal. The colour is not painted onto the surface. It comes from metal oxides in the glass batch, so the colour forms inside the material itself. This is one reason colour editions are slow and technical. A colour edition can take around 40 days to produce, depending on the firing, cooling, finishing, and inspection.

I like crystal because it never holds light still. It changes as you move around it. It can look quiet from one angle and suddenly alive from another. That makes it a strange material for animal forms, especially animals caught in movement. The body is frozen, but the light keeps moving.

Some metal sculptures can also be made through the lost-wax process, especially bronze and certain smaller cast metal works. The logic is related to crystal casting, but the material behaviour is very different.

A wax version of the sculpture is made from the prototype, then invested in a heat-resistant mold. The wax is burned out, leaving a cavity. Molten metal is then poured into that cavity. After cooling, the mold is broken away and the raw casting is cleaned, chased, welded if needed, ground, polished, or patinated.

With bronze, the final surface can be patinated, polished, or finished in different tones. Bronze has its own language: warmer, older, more traditional, and often more visibly connected to the history of sculpture.

With stainless steel, the finishing can be much more demanding because the surface may need to be taken through many stages of grinding and polishing before it reads as clean, reflective metal.

This is different from my large stainless-steel sculptures, which are usually fabricated from shaped stainless-steel sheets rather than cast in one piece.

My large stainless-steel sculptures are not usually cast like bronze. They are fabricated from sheet metal, which means the final form is built from many shaped pieces that have to become one continuous body.

The process often begins with the digital sculpture being divided into workable sections. Those sections become templates, panels, and marked parts in the workshop. Flat stainless-steel sheet is cut, hammered, rolled, pressed, or panel-beaten into curved forms. At this stage the pieces can look almost crude: marked with guide lines, covered in scratches, full of heat stains, and still visibly separate from each other.

That ugly stage is important. It is where the sculpture is still revealing how it was made.

The shaped panels are then test-fitted like a three-dimensional puzzle. They are tack-welded, adjusted, welded more fully, ground back, and checked again. A curve that looks smooth on the computer has to be forced into real metal by hand. If the panel moves from heat, if a seam pulls, or if the shape loses tension, it has to be corrected before the next stage can work.

After welding, the surface goes through a long sequence of grinding, sanding, and polishing. The seams are reduced until they stop reading as joins. The surface moves from rough fabrication marks to a dull satin finish, then through finer and finer stages until the stainless steel becomes reflective.

A mirror finish is not a coating. It is the result of removing scratches until the metal can hold the world clearly.

I use different grades of stainless steel depending on the finish and location. 304 stainless steel can be used for certain colour-finished or painted editions. 316 stainless steel is preferred for mirror-polished works because it gives a cleaner, more durable surface. For outdoor works, coastal environments, or heavy-weather public sculpture, 316L stainless steel is usually the better choice because of its stronger corrosion resistance.

This is one reason I often prefer stainless steel over bronze. Bronze has its own beauty, but it usually holds more surface irregularity. Stainless steel can be polished to a level of clarity that suits the precision of my digital forms. The mirror surface is not just decorative. It pulls the viewer into the sculpture. You are literally reflected in the animal, which makes the emotional read harder to keep at a distance.

Stainless steel also has a practical advantage for long-term public work: it is durable, repairable, corrosion-resistant when the right grade is chosen, and recyclable.

This is why stainless steel suits my work. It is industrial, heavy, and stubborn, but after enough labour it can look inflated, fluid, and almost weightless. The material begins as hard sheet metal and ends as a reflective skin. It catches the sky, trees, buildings, people, and weather. A polished stainless-steel sculpture is never only itself. It borrows the world around it and pulls that world onto its surface.

That matters especially in public sculpture. A large stainless-steel work changes throughout the day. Morning light, rain, clouds, nearby architecture, and the movement of people all become part of the piece. The sculpture does not sit quietly in a space. It keeps negotiating with the space.

There is a contradiction in that, and I like contradictions. Stainless steel says permanence, industry, and weight. My forms often want to suggest breath, movement, animals, and a slightly ridiculous sense of life. The work becomes interesting when those two things are both true.

Marble and granite are different from crystal and steel because they begin as a block.

For marble and granite, I first design the sculpture digitally. Once the form is resolved, I create detailed reference views from many angles. These become the visual map for the carver: front, side, back, top, three-quarter views, and detail references where needed.

This is where the artist's eye and the carver's hand have to meet. The digital model gives the direction, but the stone still has to be read, carved, corrected, and finished by hand. The carver is not simply copying a file. They are translating a digital form into a physical block that has grain, density, faults, weight, and resistance.

The process is subtractive. You do not pour or fabricate the form into existence. You remove what does not belong. The sculpture is already trapped inside the stone in the most inconvenient way possible, and the job is to persuade it out without destroying it.

Stone carving is slower, quieter, and more final. With digital modelling, I can undo a mistake. With wax, I can repair or rework. With steel, a panel can sometimes be replaced. But stone remembers every decision. A wrong cut is not a small technical issue. It can change the whole sculpture.

Marble has softness, depth, and skin. Granite is harder, heavier, and more resistant. Both materials carry time differently from steel or crystal. They feel older before I even touch them.

For me, stone gives animal forms a different kind of presence. A roaring lion in crystal might feel like light and appetite. The same lion in marble might feel more internal, more ancient, more uncertain. The weight of the material changes the psychology of the work.

This is why I do not think of marble and granite as just luxury materials. They carry pressure, silence, and permanence. They slow the sculpture down.

Marble or granite carving can take around 30 days before shipping, depending on the size, stone type, complexity, and finishing requirements.

People sometimes assume that because I design on a computer, the work is machine-made or somehow less handmade. I see it differently.

The computer is where I think. The material is where the sculpture proves itself.

Digital sculpting lets me build movement, exaggeration, and proportion with the control I learned from years in 3D animation. But once the work leaves the screen, it enters a much older world. Wax has to be cleaned by hand. Crystal has to be annealed. Stainless steel has to be hammered, welded, and polished. Stone has to be carved and finished through the body.

The digital model is not just a sketch. It becomes the technical reference for the whole project. From the 3D model I can create renders, maquettes, production drawings, and angle references before the material work begins. This is especially useful for commissions, public sculpture, hospitality projects, and architectural spaces, where clients need to understand scale, proportion, and surface before production starts.

The basic pipeline is:

Software → 3D-printed maquette → physical making → hand finishing

The final object is not digital. It is physical, slow, and stubborn.

I like that contradiction. The work begins in software, but it ends in heat, dust, pressure, polish, and touch. It is contemporary in the way it is designed, but old-school in the way it becomes real.

That is also why I keep returning to animals, breath, motion, and emotional states. A sculpture has to hold something that is felt before it is explained. The process is technical, but the point is not technique for its own sake.

The point is to make something that carries presence.

Something that feels alive, even though it cannot move.

Production time depends on size, material, finish, edition, and shipping. A small crystal colour edition can take around 40 days. Marble or granite carving can take around 30 days before shipping. Stainless-steel works can take 45 days or longer, and large public or custom projects may take several months because they involve design approval, engineering, fabrication, finishing, packing, transport, and installation planning.

These timelines are guides, not promises. A sculpture can be delayed by material behaviour, kiln schedules, polishing problems, stone flaws, foundry availability, shipping, weather, installation conditions, or the simple fact that a handmade object sometimes refuses to behave.