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Method
Making a shoe to be cast into bronze with Castle Fine Arts Free Wax.
Four workshops were undertaken, one with students at Quinton House School, and two at Northampton Football Club via the Cobblers Outreach Programme with students from Northgate School and the Extra Time Club for the over fifties. A group of adults also attended a workshop at the artists studio. Thirty four shoes were made in the workshops - making thirty five shoes - including this sample shoe made by Diane. Thirty three shoes were sited in Upton Place in May 2017, plus a shoe made by a pupil, was given to each school that participated in this project.
The size of each shoe was determined by the 245g weight of wax allocated to each person – however some people made shoes lighter than this and a handful made heavier footwear. It evened out so that the correct total weight of wax was used.
The wax was melted safely in two big slow cookers placed on melamine boards provided by Jewson Coleford. Melamine boards also provided a work surface for making the wax shoes. The artists brought all the tools and equipment needed to create the sculptures. The participants brought their designs and research images.
Wax can be modelled directly, a technique used in the example above or made into thin sheets, cut out and assembled which is how most the shoes in the workshops were made.
Click here to see the Castle Fine Arts Foundry information leaflet about working in wax.
The WAX Shoes At the Foundry
All thirty four wax shoes shown here at Castle Fine Arts Foundry. Chris Weston the Commercial Manger took these photos to document the process.
These photos show the wax shoes after they have been attached to the wax pouring cups (the pyramid bases under each shoe) with wax rod "runners' to allow the bronze to flow in and 'risers' to allow air and gas to escape as the bronze is poured in.
By making the shoes in wax they were directly cast into bronze via the ceramic shell technique without the need for making an extra mould, which would have been necessary if the shoe had been made in clay or plaster.
The examples below show a wax shoe attached to the pouring cup, and shoes after several coatings of the the ceramic shell slurry.
Click here to see a video showing ceramic moulds and a bronze pour at Castle Fine Arts Foundry.
Large sculptures are cast in sections and welded together. However the shoes for this project are small enough to be cast in one piece. Check out the sculpture page and see if you can recognise any of the shoes here under their ceramic shell coating. There are also images of the workshops showing people making their shoes.
When the wax has had enough dried coats of the slurry it is fired to become a hard ceramic shell, and the wax melts out leaving a void. The mould is inverted so the pouring cup is at the top, ready for the molten bronze to be poured into.
Once it all has cooled the ceramic shell can be broken off, and the resulting bronze cleaned and patinated. Here are the shoes after they have been broken out of the moulds with the pouring cups, runners and risers still attached - these were cut off after the remaining pieces of the ceramic mould were removed.
The shoes below have been cleaned up and the stainless steel fixings attached.
The following images show a shoe being patinated. The bronze is heated up and chemicals applied that change its colour. Also shown are rows of the patinated shoes - the final stage is to give them a coat of wax to protect them.
The image below shows the wax shoe sample now cast into bronze and patinated green with the highlights rubbed back to reveal the dull gold of the bronze.