Tamara Hensick Designs: How it's Made

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How it's Made


Inspiration Tamara’s inspiration for her work comes from everyday life whether it be sayings, overheard conversations, musings, humorous phrases, nature observed (be it flora, fauna or human), the animate, inanimate, or man-made, all in the desire to find meaning, see beauty and to laugh.		Hand-Craft With an idea decided upon, the piece is hand sculpted in sculpting wax or modeling clay. The sayings or words are stamped into the soft medium and the finished prototype is then molded. Depending on the casting process the molds are used for wax injection to create individual wax models or to cast metal directly in to.
The Casting Process: All of Tamara’s work is hand cast in the Los Angeles, California area using 3 different casting techniques: the Lost Wax Process, Centrifugal Casting and Shell Casting.
	The Lost Wax Process The small bronze, white bronze and sterling pieces are cast in a 13-step centrifugal process. A wax model is required for each piece cast, so a silicon or vulcanized mold is made of the original sculpture. It is injected with liquid casting wax creating a wax model which must be hand cleaned of mold lines and other imperfections. Depending on the size of the piece, several models may be cast at once. These are mounted or “sprued” together with wax wire to create a “tree”. The tree is then attached to a rubber base and covered with a hollow metal flask which is filled with a liquid investment compound and left to dry. The rubber base is taken off, the flask placed in a kiln and the wax burnt out leaving a void. With centrifugal force, the molten metal of choice is drawn into the void, cooled, and the casting broken out of the investment. The pieces are cut off the tree, sand blasted and tumbled in ceramic, plastic or steel shot mediums to polish.		Shell Casting This process is used to cast the larger bronze works. As with the Lost Wax Process, individual wax models are required and multiple pieces can be cast simultaneously using wax wire to gate the pieces together into a tree. The tree is then dipped into three different ceramic slurries: the first is thin and strong, the second thick and heavy and the third coarse. The tree is dipped into each slurry twice creating a thick shell which is then placed into a kiln and fired to cure the shell and burn out the wax which leaves it hollow. The molten bronze is then poured into the hollow shell. After cooling, the casting is broken out of the shell, the pieces cut from the tree and sandblasted. These too are tumbled in ceramic, plastic or steel shot mediums to polish.
	Centrifugal Casting This process is used for pewter and zinc pieces. A hard vulcanized rubber “master mold” is first made of the original work. The “master mold” is then used to create multiple metal castings of the object to then make a second “production mold”. The production mold allows for 3 to 12 of the same piece (depending on size) to be cast simultaneously. When casting pewter or zinc, the molds are spun and the molten metal is poured in. After the mold cools the metal objects are extracted, they are hand cleaned of mold lines and metal “flash”. They too are tumbled to polish.