Uruboros Shell

The Uruboros Shell Project

The Uruboros Shell Project began its life back in 2010 as a digital painting. I mocked up a quick model in Mudbox and painted in roots and flowers in Photoshop.

I remember liking the model well enough to resurrect it after a decade, and give it some new life.

I pulled it back into Zbrush and experimented with a few different sculpts

I think the primary motif for this turned out to be the sulcata paneling seen in tortoise shells

There are however a few versions of this, using stone, bark, crab and rhinoceros skins. I might try printing and bronzing one of them too in the future.

The target size for this piece wasn't terribly ambitious, but larger than the bed of my Elegoo Mars printer, so I had to divide it up into 22 sections.

Here is a view of the forward sections of the shell, mirrored for left and right sides.

Another section, one side, around the midsection. This is ready for printing in the chitubox slicing software.

This shows one complete side of the model, extracted from its support structure and some of its mirrored brothers, still connected to their birthing umbilicals..

Both sides, separated from their respective printing supports and ready to be glued together.

I had to think about and discuss the best way to cast this. I glued together the right and left sides, but determined that the top and bottoms should be kept separate for mold making and casting.

Top and bottom sections glued up and ready for putty

Top and bottom sections, puttied up, filed, sanded and sealed for mold making

I worked for a bronze sculptor, back in the day, and am familiar with the amount of time it takes to cast something. I am rusty, had no interest in doing that, and simply dont have that kind of time, so hired a professional to throw the mold for waxes.

A view of the inside of the rubber mold, after the wax positive has been extracted

Another view of the rubber mold

Wax positive of the sculpture, top and bottom already joined together but still awaiting some finishing

A more polished version of the wax cast, ready for investment and metal casting

The wax finishing process is long. It should take a considerable amount of time. It never comes out of the mold perfect and you have to keep in mind that the next step, investment and casting is accurate enough that you will see your fingerprints!

A significant chunk of bronze! this casting came out far better than I could have hoped. Take note of the sprue points that are in need of grinding off. Nothing a couple minutes with an angle grinder and Dremel tool can't fix.

Sprue points ground off, this is mostly back to the surface of the wax and 3d print positives.

An excellent cast from Jonathan Campbell at http://lostwax.co.nz/

This is day 3 of the bronze cast being exposed to the air. I live by the sea, so its pretty windy and humid here.

Take a look at the coloration of the bronze, just a couple of days later and how the atmosphere has tarnished the metal

I made a couple of plinths from some MDF and puttied them up. These are specific to this sculpture and the Ghost Flower I have documented in a previous post.

After grinding off the sprue points and doing a little finishing work, I took this back to the foundry, for a base black coat of Patina

I experimented with a few colorations, but they looked like ass. This needed a second sandblasting, pickle and dunk into a proper patina solution to get the proper base coat.

So, what do you do with a proper base coat of patina on a bronze? you sand it back off of course...

I wanted to get a nice contrast of high polished smooth bronze and rougher black patina, highly textured areas.

This shows the level of darkness I wanted, mostly...I think I would have liked it to be jet black, but sometimes the chemistry doesn't always cooperate.

I experimented with a number of patina colors and definitely wanted to work in some blue/greens

Getting pretty happy now with the layers of different oxidation and the level of polish on the smooth surfaces

Good detail in this one. A good range of colors and great resolution of features

The mounting hole can be seen here, a 6mm stainless steel screw can be used to mount this into the pedestal. I epoxied and puttied a bolt into the plinth's top panel at a depth 3mm below the surface. It screws in pretty solidly.

There was a good bit of back and forth about the amount of black to green for this. Numerous iterations of applying black patinas and greens, experimenting with layers and sanding them back down to reveal the raw metal.

Pretty happy with the overall balance of the piece, this is just after the wax coat was applied, sealing it in a microcrystalline shell. Calling it Done.

The Uroboros Shell at the Non Disclosed artists show: https://www.instagram.com/nondisclosedartist/?fbclid=IwAR1dylq6lSxByGolB0_CW3i90mgq7u0x5DCSJhBtJyntIIUOWtpUPGQJyOY

Free wine = blurry documentation

This is back at home. I had to Work from home the other day, unexpectedly, so put up some light blocking curtains, but realized the natural light made the pieces look pretty good too

Final polish and wax

good detail along the spines

Some final images of the completed piece...

I was at first annoyed by the stair stepping artifacts produced by the 3d print process.

In the end however, I appreciated the fine/wierd details the whole process imbued to the work

I am impressed by the resiliency of some of the features. Fingerprints, seams and print layers can still be seen through some pretty significant physical processes.

My favorite concept about this whole process is: this insignificant cluster of data points, that can be wiped out with a tiny surge in electromagnetism, can be transmuted into something that will still be largely intact, even if found 20,000 yrs later.

Overall a very good project. I learned a lot and have a few other ideas I would like to try out next from this. Thank you to everyone that helped me along the way!