Forming Wire Sculpture Figures

Video transcription

We are going to start here with our basic figure and I start with a piece of wire for the torso here, one long piece for the arms and a smaller piece that we've bent to the shape of our figure's face and head and one long piece that we laid out for the legs. What I do is that I figure for the actual length of the leg and I add about an inch for the hip space across so that we can have that pivot point as we get into manipulating. So I am just going quickly braise these pieces together. The nice thing with trying to keep the form fairly simple at the beginning is that we only have 1, 2, and 3 joints that we have to join together and we could even shorten that if I had done the whole neck here and we would only be joining that to there. So we will take in since we've already adjusted our torch, I will strike away as soon as I get some gas and we'll get it nice and toasty and I am going to use my uncoated rod and heat that up really quick and I dip it into the flux so that it is all gooey and we are going to heat up the wire. We want to be careful that we don't melt it. We are just getting it nice and hot so that the braising rod will actually flow around the joint. You want it to be that nice shiny gold color like that. Come up to the arms. Now I just don't want to get the top and that's what happened. I just got the top hot. I'm going to get the underneath part hot too and then we are going to melt the braising rod right into the hole. The trick gets that we want just enough. We don't want this big glob on there. The trick becomes being able to heat it up and melt it on there without making a big globby mess. You want just enough but you want enough. So now we have one whole man with legs and arms.