At the end of February a public story art trail will be installed in Thame and in this series of articles we are sharing the process that has led to its creation. Last week we shared the designs with you and this week we want to share the journey that has taken these designs from a 2D drawing to the 3D creations that will be installed. This has been a long and complex process, but has also been hugely exciting, watching them come to life. Below are a series of links that take you to videos and images showing stages of this process.
The first stage was to make little maquettes of each of the way markers. These are small versions of the designs that Nicola (the public artist leading the work) carved out of wood to allow her to see the work in 3D so she could figure out the scale of the final pieces. https://www.instagram.com/p/CYl_WPjMEMQ/
Elements of the way markers are made out of sand cast, anodised and powder coated aluminium. For these elements Nicola had to carve full size versions out of wood, that in turn were used to create sand casts into which molten aluminium was poured to create the final piece. https://www.instagram.com/p/CiHvbAsDUYa/
Alongside these sandcast elements are other sections of the way markers made out of laser cut steel. The design process requires that these have full size vector images created of them.
The final stage is to powder coat the various elements in different colours and then combine them onto their central core in place. See the full process here https://www.instagram.com/p/CnMkrahPVKq/
