Ghost Flower Project

A bronze and resin sculpture of an ethereal flower.

The Ghost Flower Project. A digitally incepted, Bronze and Resin Sculpture.

The final product, bronze and resin

Flower and fitting, sculpted in Zbrush. Flower printed in white translucent resin. The Fitting was printed and cast in bronze.

Flower and Fitting. I used https://www.shapeways.com/ for many of these parts

leaf style 02 - uploaded to shapeways for bronze casting

leaf style 01 - uploaded to shapeways for bronze casting

leaf style 01 and with large buttress stem

The wax stem, sculpted by hand out of sprue wax and cast at a local Wellington New Zealand foundry : http://lostwax.co.nz/

All pieces cast in bronze

Leaf style 02 cast in bronze. I was impressed with the level of detail it retained through numerous physical processes (i.e printing, curing, investment and metal casting)

So now that I have all the pieces, time to start soldering them all together.

I had to truss them up with steel wire and made sure to leave little key holes and grooves the pieces would fit into. They were designed with a little leeway and little cavities to account for solder and flux.

The mini hand torch did an excellent job of soldering the tiny bronze sculptures together.

This is after all the leaves and stems have been soldered together.

The real challenge would be to get the stems to solder on to the hand sculpted stem. The bronzes are wildly different thicknesses and actually slightly different consistencies. They tarnished slightly different from each other.

This was tricky. I bound it up as tight as I could, so this one is packed with flux and solder. It had to go all at once. I couldnt risk getting one stem on and heating a previously successful weld too much, causing it to fall off.

This is just after all of the soldering. Somehow it was successful. Honestly, I had very little idea what I was doing. Luckily, I was quite surprised to feel how strong the bind was once cooled. On the next sculpture, however, I will use metal epoxy !

After it was all soldered up, its time for the patina.

I went with a deep black patina, using a Sulphur mix and sanded back the high points for contrast.

A few pre wax details

All pieces are soldered on and have the desired amount of patina.

A micro crystalline wax to restore a bit of bling and make that black deeper, to contrast the polished bronze edging on the leaves.

Soldered, Patinaed and waxed, overlooking the Cook Straight.

Finally, the last step was to epoxy on the white resin flower petal. Its has an impressive level of detail, very accurate to the digital file. Excellent resin print from Shapeways.

At the Non Disclosed Artists Show. A show of my fellow colleagues at Weta Digital, showcasing what we do in our spare time.

I did damage this in transport the morning of installation. I didn't secure the piece well enough and it banged around in its container.

I had to run back home, grind and clean the weld points that had broken off and re-solder them on.

It came back together with a tense hour of frantic soldering and I was able to get this installed at the show on time.

A little more detail for the flower