'Blanchard vase' replacement.
In late 2009, I was commissioned to create a replacement sculpture of a very old and weathered 'Blanchard' vase neck for a client of 'Shaws of Darwen', a company in Lancashire who create very high quality architectural faience for heritage buildings worldwide including The Wrigley Building in Chicago and Harrod's in London. The task entailed taking rubbings and accurate measurements off the original urn neck and replicating them in clay onto a pre-prepared plaster 'blank' which was itself a remarkable, precision-turned piece of work by the lads in the plaster shop working off the dimensions of the original urn which was located in St Mary's Square in Bury St. Edmund's.
I divided the blank into accurate sections and created stencils from the rubbings. I used the stencils to mark out all the floral and leaf features within the divisions on the plaster blank. Because all the features overlapped intricately on the original, each feature was sculpted and moulded in separate sessions on the neck. Press castings were then taken off the moulds and each leaf feature was precisely aligned and placed witihin the divisions on the plaster blank and then re-sculpted, blended and consolidated into eachother to correspond to the original urn.
Below the two main photos is a gallery exemplifying the step-by-step procedure employed to create this reproduction.
Galllery of sculpting and moulding procedure - click on images below for larger views and details.
Telephone: (UK) 07507910758
Architectural and faience reproduction.