It's a good thing I enjoy variety. I just got an order for a few hundred pewter medals, 40mm across, with a couple of medals plated in silver. The same job involves making a 35cm bas relief of the soldier and dog for a bronze plaque.

I will be working with a magnifying glass next week, instead of a hoist and pneumatic tools.

Here's the artwork for the medals. It's easy to get most of the detail by sending black and white art to Sterling Marking in London, ON. They will send back a rubber engraving with black detail precisely raised from the white background. I'll work with my plastics to create the master pattern. The man and dog will have to be carved separately, hence the magnifying glass.  The man's head will be about 4mm high. Not much room for expression there.

Still, I will be casting these into silicone rubber, so I'll pick up all the detail that I can carve. Here's an older medal I made:

I will update this project as I move forward. Meantime, there's big stuff to get out of the studio and off to the painter. And there's cleanup, sigh. That's just not my forté.

I was recently sent this drawing and asked to make a 75mm diameter bronze medallion. This was to be cast lost wax at Artcast, so fine detail was not an issue. Still, there were lots of challenges here. Carving those tiny hands to the customer's satisfaction was going to be hard. Was I supposed to model these under a magnifier and send copies for approval? I could get the lettering done more or less digitally, but the hands were something that I would normally have modeled in wax. 

I played for some days with a different ways of generating a 3D drawing of these. After all kinds of failures, I hit upon a combination of Photoshop, Rhino 3D and Sculptris, the latter a program that allowed me to shape surfaces in a freehand way with the mouse.

This is a screenshot from Sculptris. I sent quite a number of versions of this to the customer. Happily, the changes requested were only tweaks. 

Once the hands were approved, I added that surface to the medal. It's great that I can render my models in Rhino for approval. The customer could see exactly what they were going to get.

I found a great company in BC, NSCNC that makes precision CNC mills for jewellers who could cut the wax from my digital model. Using cutters only a bit larger than the diameter of a hair, they cut this beautifully. Shown above is the wax.

And here is the medal as cast and finished by Artcast. Unbelievable detail! I would never have pulled this off without all those digital toys.