Dancing the night away...

Wow, what a busy week it's been in the House of Signs workshop. There are a multitude of enjoyable projects being worked on, however, the main focus has been on the continuation of the Dancing Bears project. The transformation this week alone has been quite exciting. The beatifully sculpted bears are nearing completion, and are dancing around the workshop awaiting their glasses of wine. Many hours of were put into the aspen trees, detailing the bark, rolling out large sheets of Magic Sculpt, hand-forming each leave then applying to the branches by the dozens. The pine trees continued to transform with even greater detail and thicker branches. The ground or base, which spans the entire artpiece, was formed with foil, metal lathe and Magic Sculpt, and waits a second coat of epoxy.  The "Snowmass" ribbon got underway, with incise-carved lettering and hand-carved folds. All of us can hardly wait to see this paragon come to life in the paint-finishing stages. Next week this project will sit patiently as we focus on some tight deadlines for the opening of the 2011/12 ski season at Breckenridge Ski Resort on November 11th. We will be back with more exciting updates, and hopefully the bears won't go into hibernation.  Roger Cox -  houseofsignsco.com

 

Two bears, a magpie and crushed glass...

 

A great deal of progress has been made this week on the House of the Dancing Bears artpiece. Here you see the steel rod armeratures for the two dancing bears getting bulked up with aluminum foil. This process allows us to get the rough proportions fairly close before coating, sculpting and texturing the figures with the magic sculpt epoxy resin. The foil method also helps keep the weight down, which is a consideration as this piece is approaching 300 pounds. The foreground pine tree was adorned with a sculpted magpie, Colorado's notoriously loud but beautiful bird. Bonnie even added a slight attitude to it's expression which fits their personality quite well.  The background for the main header sign was painted with a marine epoxy, and then imported German Osmalto was sprinkled into the wet epoxy for curing. This crushed glass was a custom mixture of four different colors of light and dark reds, and a splash of amber. Next step on the sign will be gilding the letters and border with genuine 23k gold leaf, and sculpting a columbine, our State flower, which will embellish the top of the sign. My daughter Hailey is proudly posing in front of the sign, which is now officially her favorite sign that has ever come out of Dad's shop. Tomorrow will be an exciting day of sculpting, texturing and carving.

Stay tuned...

Roger Cox  -  houseofsignsco.com