Viracocha – The Metal Arrives

I picked up a big load of metal for my Viracocha sculpture on Wednesday afternoon. Karen had the van and I had to use her car so I couldn’t get all the metal I needed just then. I drove back over today with the van and got the rest of the stuff I needed for now. I still have a few pieces yet to design and I have to get all the flashy brass, copper and aluminum cut out but I can get the whole thing about 85% done with what I have right now.

Rather than start assembling the whole sculpture right off, I decided to weld up some of the subassemblies instead of doing them as I need them. That way, when I start putting things together everything will be ready. The first thing I did was assemble the glyph panels. There are 3 sizes of these; the biggest is for structural bracing, the middle ones are the staff heads, and the littlest ones are torso details. The metal company who cut out the pieces, Marion Iron, couldn’t cut one of them, it was too detailed for their machine. And they made a mistake on one piece. Luckily I got some of the drop off from them and could redo it. Unfortunately, their automatic machine does a better job than my poor excuse for hand cutting.

Their machine just does the basic cut outs. When I got the blank pieces, I had to go in and add some details. I got the hands and feet done today and tomorrow I hope to get the body details done and maybe start to put some of it together.

More later…

In other sculpture news, one of the pieces I got back from the From Our Hands gallery in Des Moines a couple of weeks ago is in for a make over. I plan to have it painted bright red. On Monday I took it to Triple E Manufacturing and left it to be sand blasted. I picked it up this morning and took it right over to the painter, A-1.

Also, I stopped by the Corner House gallery yesterday and talked to the new owner, Mary Suess. I showed her some of the things on my sculpture web page and she said she wanted to have some of them in her sculpture garden. That will be great.