My wife Susan and I attend the Loveland Sculpture Show each August. We often see works that inspire us and we’d love to bring home, but the prices are prohibitive. About thirty years ago I cast an eight-foot-tall concrete sculpture in Baker Park, in Frederick, Maryland. So when Susan mentioned that she liked a certain sculpture, I said, “We could design and make a sculpture ourselves.”
The wooden frame for the base is a 24 X 30” slab.Wood pieces are laid out on a full-scale drawing.
The wood pieces are attached to a ¾” plywood base. The circle is made from tapered 2 X 2’s in two sections. The shims allow for the half-circle pieces to be easily removed.
Susan spreads Bondo inside the curved plywood sides for strength.
The finished form was coated with a concrete parting agent to make separation easier. After the concrete (half Portland cement and half sand) is inserted, metal angles are pressed in to add strength. The concrete mixture should be wet enough so that it fills in the surface of the form.
To make the back design, tapered wooden rays and round pebbles are pressed into the concrete. The hollowed-out area makes room for the rebar embedded in the base.
After allowing the concrete to cure for three days, our neighbor Perry used his skid-loader to lift the sculpture onto the base.
I screwed metal clamps around the rebar, which was covered with several layers of concrete.The finished sculpture is four-feet tall. We coated it with two coats of concrete sealer.
The Art of Joseph Osmann 