Wax carving for lost wax casting

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I have been wax carving, a lot. I wanted to create some cast pieces and I found so many suitable projects in my notebooks. A process I enormously enjoy and which I have been neglecting for many long years. 

Are you interested in this process? learn more about it:

This green stuff is wax, a special kind of wax that we use to create models that will later be cast in silver or gold. The wax is available in several colours, there's blue which is more flexible and softer, green which is the hardest and takes detail best - to a certain extent it can be polished! and then there's purple which is something in between. I'm using the green because I need very crisp detail for this tracery 🙂

The process is called lost wax casting, since the original wax model is lost during the process. This technique is thousands of years old, already known by the ancient Greeks who used it at large scale to create their cast bronze statues. There's some related and also ancient techniques such as sand or cuttlefish bone casting.

The way this is currently done, is a number of these models are attached to a central stem via smaller wax rods, which makes it look very much like a tree, and then an impression of the whole is created by pouring a special plaster around it.

The whole is heated up until the wax pours out entirely. It is then turned upside down and molten metal is cast through the central stem and it flows, hopefully, into every tiny detailed cranny of the perfect impression left by the wax. Sometimes a vacuum or centrifuge are used to get a better impression.

Once sufficiently cooled, the plaster can be broken and washed off, and the pieces are cut off the central stem (silver and gold are infinitely recyclable, so the leftover metal will again be reused). Now there's plenty of finishing work ahead to remove all traces of the feeding rods and rebuild the original texture in those areas.

I like working with wax since it is, in a way, sculpture. You can work substractively, as when stone is carved, by only removing material, as I did on the tracery above. You then have to imagine the form inside the block of wax and remove what is not needed. You can also work additively however, like you'd model with clay. With a heated instrument you can add more wax.

When working on the tree, once I removed the model from the stopper I was working on, I could simply not resist to spend twice as long in carving the back of the piece in much the same way. The pink wax is very soft and pliable and comes in sheets of different thickness. It is totally hopeless when it comes to carving it though, because it is soft and gummy. But it served well here as a support for the curved design, which I built up with hard green wax.

I amassed a little collection of pieces these last few weeks, and they're now at the caster. You can see them at the end of the video. The last one, the ring with a pointy house, was made by my 5 year old son :) 

I will show you more about these pieces soon! Will some pieces be enamelled? probably!

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