Kid made bronze sculpture

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We're joining in with Red Ted Art's Kids Get Arty this week, the idea is to explore a great artist, discuss it with your kids then create a child appropriate art activity.  Our boys are always much more into the process than the end result so we chose to look at bronze sculptures rather than one specific artist, but as bronze requires a very complex process and incredible heat we went with Plaster of Paris instead.

We started off by looking at bronze sculptures on the iPad, they especially liked Richard the Lionheart by Carlo Marochetti as it's in London, because of the Robin Hood connection and because it includes a huge horse.  We also watched a You Tube video of how bronze sculpture is made.

A major part of the bronze sculpture process is to make a mold then to fill it with bronze.  We made our molds by taking objects such as a Duplo brick and imprinting them in playdough.

The boys chose the objects and went for Duplo, tire tracks, a pig face and a dinosaur footprint.

Then we mixed up our Plaster of Paris.  All you do is add water and a big bag of it was super cheap in our local craft store.

Next up the boys with a little assistance spooned the Plaster of Paris into the playdough molds.

We let the molds set for about an hour and then pealed them out of the playdough.

To get the playdough out of all the nooks I used a nailbrush.

Here's the finished product, the pig turned out best.

To make them look even more like the original bronze sculptures we then painted them with acrylic paint.  We went for bright colours for the Duplo and metallics for everything else.

The pig is still my favourite, not sure what to do with him now, but we definitely want to do more Plaster of Paris activities.  We thoroughly enjoyed this kids activity, we did it as a whole family and the results made for a nice keepsake, we've talked about making footprints next which I think would be really fun - what would you make?

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